


to grow

by flora_tyronelle



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Grieving, Happy castle living for the terrible trio, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, OT3, Obviously major spoilers for season 2!, Sass, Slow Burn, The selfish alternate ending to season 2 that only I yearn for, domestic life, rated for language, this is slow burn after all, unexpected sieges, well maybe not happy, yes plural
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2019-10-27 11:36:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17766068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flora_tyronelle/pseuds/flora_tyronelle
Summary: What if, at the end of season two, Sypha and Trevor hadn't gone riding off into the sunset?Domestic life and Dracula's ghost and three mildly fucked-up individuals. Nothing can possibly go wrong here.





	1. Chapter 1

_As above; so below. To grow, and grow, and grow._

 

The dawn marches unceasingly over the silent earth. Sunlight unfolds across the sky, sighing between the clouds, prompting the few surviving birds to lift their heads and feebly sing a welcome. Trevor finds that he’s breathing in clean air like he usually breathes in drink, a similar unquenchable thirst. There’s barely a trace of smoke, not a hint of spilled blood. Something strange is struggling within his chest.

It’s over.

Sypha’s hand, small within his, squeezes slightly. Then she yawns so wide her jaw makes an audible cracking sound. “Are we safe here, do you think?”

The sudden awareness of exhaustion hits Trevor like a wall. Harder than a wall, actually- he’s hit plenty of those over the past few hours. It takes all he has in him not to sway on the spot. It also occurs to him that between the ruins of his ancestral home and Dracula’s fucking castle, there really isn’t a single place on earth he could possibly feel _less_ safe.

But, with sunlight on his face and these two idiots by his side, he finds he can’t bring himself to care.

“Let’s sleep out in the light,” he mumbles. His vision is blurring slightly at the edges every time he blinks. Weird.

“Sleep, Belmont?” Alucard’s voice is still subdued, but then again he did just watch his father die by his own hand after battling through a vampiric horde, so Trevor’ll let it slide without a ribbing. “You don’t mean to suggest you’re _tired_?”

It takes Trevor’s fogged brain a disturbingly long while to realise that he’s joking. Then, with as much aplomb as he can muster, he drops Sypha’s hand and walks down the steps to the battered grass below. “Fuck-” he raises his left middle finger, “- you.” He raises the right so they can see both gestures, before keeling over onto the ground. It’s soft. Almost squishy, after all those walls. He closes his eyes, and listens to Sypha’s pealing laughter as he hurtles towards sleep. If he weren’t so tired, he might have even joined in.

Hours later, he wakes to find the sun pouring down above his head in a wholly disagreeable fashion. His body still feels thick with all the pain that’s been pummelled into it over the past few days. Famous Belmont stamina can only get him so far: this will take time to heal. All the same, even a few hours of rest have helped. Now his attention is drawn to the gnawing ache of hunger in his belly. _Food_.

He pushes himself up and realises Sypha is passed out on the ground a few feet away. Her wounded shoulder has been bound up, although red shows against the bandages, and her face is pale but peaceful. He abruptly realises that the both of them are covered in more dirt and bruises than ever before, even after Gresit and the catacombs. There’s no sign of Alucard.

Trevor indulges in a very satisfying groan as he clambers to his feet, which succeeds in waking Sypha. She blinks in the sudden brightness and lets out a feeble noise that doesn’t quite manage to be a word. Then she sits up all at once. “Are we being attacked?”

Trevor looks around. Nothing rears menacingly out of the tumbled ruins of the Belmont Mansion, no shadows start writhing sinuously. “Doesn’t look like it. Fancy some food?”

She slumps back to the ground. “Oh.” Then her eyes open wide again. “ _Oh_. Food?”

Trevor nods slowly. “You eat it, or so I hear.”

Sypha gets to her feet, wincing a little when she bears weight on her injured shoulder. “You are not funny, _Trevy_.”

Trevor’s only possible response to this is to scoff wordlessly as he follows her back into the castle. _Trevy_. He’d hoped she’d forgotten that.

The great echoing shadows of the entrance hall still hold some level of menace and Trevor reflexively represses a shudder. The pools of blood and strewn corpses littering the floor admittedly don’t really help the ambience. He supposes they’ll have to burn all the bodies. From experience, that’ll stink for days. As if they needed any more fouling of their locality. Still, better to be completely sure all these bastards really are dead.

“Trevor!” He looks up from his contemplation of the open-air graveyard to see Sypha beckoning him from a side-corridor they hadn’t explored in last night’s desperate battle. “Are you going to stand there and admire my handiwork all day or are you coming to find something to eat?”

“ _Your_ handiwork?” Trevor immediately demands, but then his stomach makes such a long and pointed growl that he shuffles into reluctant action. “They don’t appear to be burnt to a crisp, so-”

Sypha rolls her eyes and delves into the darkened passageway. “Did you not see my ice daggers? They were quite magnificent.”

“And their creator so modest.” In all honesty, he’d only been paying attention to whether she and Alucard were still alive. The fight had been so confusing and brutal, Dracula’s servants, his generals, those vampire soldiers dressed in shining plate armour… Wait. Who even were those guys, anyway?

“Ah yes,” Sypha mutters, just loud enough to be heard, “this is just who should teach me modesty. Mr Famous-Belmont-Stamina.”

“Hey!”

The passageway begins to narrow as it slopes downward, although the ceiling remains improbably high. Right. Eight-foot-tall master of the hall. Trevor can’t imagine Dracula taking kindly to banging his head on every lintel. The image of the blackened, half-dead monster looming over Alucard barges its way back into his brain, along with the sickening surge of fear that had wrenched through his guts. He decides to change the subject.

“How do you even know this is the right way?”

“Magic.” Sypha tosses the word over her shoulder as they begin to descend a steep flight of stairs.

“Wait, seriously?” They had a food-finding spell all this time and he’s only just hearing about it?

“You really don’t know much about magic, do you? A magician has sharp senses. I am an excellent magician, and therefore have very sharp senses. I can smell the way to the stores.”

That was not the answer Trevor had been expecting. Actually, he’s not entirely sure Sypha isn’t just fucking with him for the hell of it. She’s right about one thing, at least- he really knows nothing about magic, so if she’d told him the onions were singing to her he might have believed that too.

“So, you’re like a bloodhound trapped in the body of a woman?”

Sypha laughs softly. “A bloodhound? I think that would be Alucard.” It’s mildly disturbing how that’s not even disturbing anymore, just funny. Then she stops dead and Trevor almost runs into her. “And bloodhounds are ugly, Trevor! I am not ugly.”

Trevor about swallows his tongue. What’s he supposed to say to that? Of course Sypha isn’t ugly. In fact, she’s very pretty. Stunningly pretty. And whiplash smart, and powerful as the fires of hell, and unflinchingly kind in the face of apocalyptic destruction, and still willing to show flickers of insecurity at her place within their strange little trio. Trevor’s throat works. He should tell her these things. He actually gets as far as opening his mouth to tell her these things, but Sypha interrupts him.

“Where is Alucard, do you think?”

Feeling slightly peeved (although whether this is because he knows he wasn’t actually going to say any of those things he’d been thinking), Trevor grouses, “brooding, probably. It’s a great setting for brooding.”

“Oh yes,” Sypha snaps, “when your father is dead thanks to you and your friends and your birthright is stained with blood, shame and molten metal.”

She starts forward down the stairs, carrying with her a very awkward silence. Something prickly that feels uncomfortably like the beginnings of shame settles in Trevor’s belly. Why does this _keep_ happening? Why does he keep running into these long-forgotten constraints of decency and respect like a feral animal chafing against cage walls? And why does it feel so uncomfortable? Even the thrill of rebellion that normally went along with causing offence has all but disappeared. He grimaces into the darkness, then hurries to catch up with Sypha’s retreating back.

“Sypha! Wait-”

“What.”

The wall of ice is metaphorical now, but Trevor can still feel the waves of cold rolling off it. He fumbles for a peace offering.

“I- uh- a whippet.”

“ _What_?”

_For fuck’s sake, Belmont, you had one job-_

He draws himself up very tall, very haughty. “I was simply saying that if you were a dog, you’d be a whippet.” He chances a look at Sypha’s face and sees only wary confusion. His shoulders sag. “It’s an olive branch,” he explains, his voice lowering, hoping his expression conveys some form of contrition.

Sypha looks like she’s rolling several responses around in her mouth, trying to decide which tastes best. Then she sighs in exasperation and folds her arms. “It’s a very _battered_ olive branch, Trevor.”

Phew. That sounds like they’re on their way to forgiveness. “Might be missing a few leaves, true. Why, don’t you like whippets?”

They reach the bottom of the stairs and find a choice of corridors. Sypha takes the left-hand one without hesitation.

“I like them fine. They are very little, though.”

_So are you_ , Trevor thinks, but isn’t foolish enough to say it aloud. “Slender, I would say. Graceful.”

The corner of Sypha’s mouth twitches. “Better than a wrinkly old bloodhound.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

Then her face lights up. “In here!” She pulls open a door and darts in. Light spills out, along with steamy warmth. Trevor can smell baking bread.

“What do you know,” he murmurs, following her inside, “you really can smell your way to the kitchens.”

The kitchens are a vast complex of rooms, lit by the waning light of a gaping fire set against the far wall. A huge array of pots are hanging from the ceiling, gleaming dully above the great slabs of stone workbenches. Looking around, it initially appears to have been ransacked- shelves smashed, drawers hanging open, bags and jars exploded over the floor- but there are no assailants to be seen. No corpses, either. And there’s that smell of fresh bread.

Spyha bounds triumphantly back to the worktop, her hands cradling a gently steaming loaf. “Check the churns for butter!”

Trevor does as he’s told, suddenly salivating. Fresh bread- how long has it been since they’ve eaten something not days old and already stale? He salvages butter, a paste that smells like nuts and a sharp, crumbly cheese. They sit in outsized stone chairs devouring their spoils, blissfully silent in the amber glow of the embers. Trevor hasn’t felt such relief for as long as he can remember.

When the loaf is gone, they both look at each other.

“Do you think Dracula had human servants?” Sypha wonders, staring around at the wreckage of the kitchen. “I mean, vampires don’t need-” she gestures, “-all of this.”

“I’ll wager he had humans on hand,” Trevor says, more comfortably perhaps than he’s ever said anything relating to Dracula. With a full belly and the warmth of the fire washing over him, he can’t bring himself to be pissed. “After all, they needed to eat. Him and his servants.”

“I suppose.” Sypha suddenly looks troubled. “Could any of them still be here? Alive?”

“Humans, you mean? I suppose it’s possible. Imprisoned somewhere.” Trevor hadn’t thought of that. He ambles back to his feet. “Shall we go find out?”

“We ought to ask Alucard.” Sypha’s face is still stricken as she jumps up. “This castle is too big to wander around in aimlessly.”

Trevor grimaces, suddenly remembering. “There have been countless tales of Belmont’s making it in here, only to become hopelessly lost. One of the poor bastards who actually made it out said he was wandering around without food for three days.” That had been one of Trevor’s favourite accounts to read as a child. Now, it makes him shudder to think about. _We did it_ , he reminds himself. _It’s over_. “To Alucard, then,” he mutters, and the two of them leave behind the cosy warmth of the kitchen.

But Alucard is nowhere to be found. They slog up staircases and traipse down endless hallways and occasionally call his name- although softly, as though something in the air is stilling their tongues- but there is nothing apart from the dust and the odd congealing bloodstain. Tension creeps into the swaying space between their bodies.

“Let’s go back to the entrance hall,” Sypha says softly, after a what feels like a long while.

Trevor snorts to himself. “So much for not wandering around aimlessly.” The joke falls flat into the dead silence, alleviating none of the cloying dread that threatens to press in all around them. _You’re dead, you bastard,_ Trevor wants to shout. _You’re dead, so stop fucking around on the mortal plane and shuffle off to whatever special hell they’ve got prepared for you_. The hallway does not answer. Sypha, who is now unexpectedly close to him, takes his hand again.

“Let’s _go_ ,” she repeats.

Trevor doesn’t need to be told twice.

They hardly run, but their retreat isn’t precisely leisurely, either. With every step back down the staircases, Trevor can feel the strain lifting. By the time they reach a giant room on the left of the entrance hall, stuffed with shattered glass and polished wooden benches, it seems hard to believe it had even existed in the first place. He’s about to make a second, more convincing joke, when he realises Sypha has let go of his hand and walked away to examine the cogs protruding from the walls. There’s the tiniest twinge of something in his chest at the loss of contact.

She stops in a pool of sunlight, her dirty amber curls catching and imitating its glow. “So much like the engines and things we saw under Gresit.”

Trevor walks up to join her. “Alucard must have learned it all at his daddy’s knee.” With “daddy” dead, it pains him less to admit: “It’s incredible, really.”

“It’s the true science,” Sypha tells him, her voice flickering with a familiar spark of passion, “my people heard the stories but… didn’t quite hold onto the truth of them.”

They walk side-by-side back to the entrance hall.

“Less damage than I would have thought, apart from the mess in that little room he showed us.”

“Yes.” Sypha agrees. “The engine room that moves the castle. I cannot imagine how that worked.” Honestly, thinking about it makes Trevor’s brain hurt, too. He decides to stop thinking about it. His head hurts for enough reasons as it is.

“Well, it doesn’t work anymore. You _melted_ it.”

He’s correct in thinking this will irritate her. “I didn’t melt anything! It must have been strained against the spell.”

It reassures him to hear her spit a spark again, even if it’s comparatively gentle. Tired and battle-scarred she might be, but she’s still in there, still Sypha at heart. As they approach the twin staircase, two birds take flight from up in the rafters. The pair of them watch as they wing their way out of the vast doorway, fleeing back into the light. It makes Trevor feel oddly grounded. There are still birds flying, the sun still rises. Things will recover.

At his side, Sypha’s face falls into sudden lines of sorrow, clearly struck by a thought. She looks at him and asks, “what do you think he’s going to do now?”

There’s no need to ask who “he” is- indeed, “he” has just appeared on the dais, pale and ghostly against the darker shadows of the castle within.

“I had a plan, you know.”

Trevor can’t even find it within himself to be pissed off, to ask him where the hell he’s been- then finds himself wincing internally, _phrasing_ \- he’s just relieved to have him back within eyeshot. There is a strange kind of equilibrium now, the three of them balanced together. Perhaps it’s the fulfilment of the prophecy. The world set to rights.

“I was going back to Gresit,” Alucard continues, descending the stairs, “return to my vault. Go back to sleep.”

Something has settled upon him in their absence, a haunting, resigned kind of melancholy. Trevor has a sneaking suspicion that he knows where this is going. After a small silence, he prompts, “but…”

Alucard doesn’t quite sigh, but it’s a close-run thing. “If I leave the castle here, all his work is inside it. His libraries, his materials, his knowledge. What happens to all that if the structure is abandoned? I can’t just leave it here. It’d be nothing but a grave to be robbed.”

Trevor’s suspicion is no longer sneaking; it’s marching down the stairs, waving a banner and accompanied by a pair of bagpipes.

Alucard’s golden head is bowed in the shaft of sunlight that grazes the bottom of the stairs. He looks, if possible, even more weighted down than when he was contemplating the awful inevitability of patricide. “So,” he says, with immutable nobility and sorrow, as still as a marble statue, “let it be my grave.”

There’s a beat of silence.

“No.”

Alucard just looks at him, those inhuman eyes glittering with some feeling Trevor doesn’t recognise. “No?”

Honestly, Trevor is proud that he didn’t lead with “ _Bullshit_ ” and be done with it- but he elaborates. “No. We can’t move this thing. Sypha broke it.”

She flares into indignation. “I did not!”

“You kind of did.” Alucard gives her an imperious look, and again Trevor feels that same strange sense of relief. The arrogant, sly dickhead is back with them, thanks be to god.

Sypha closes her eyes with a great deal of dignity. “ _I_ do not break things.”

The inference is clear for the both of them, oh high and mighty sorceress. Trevor turns back to Alucard. “So, we agree: she broke it.”

“Oh yes,” Alucard affirms.

“So, it’s staying right here. Forever. Right on top of the Belmont hold. Which is now also open to the world.” Trevor walks a little towards the stairs, feeling the gazes of the other two following him. “Up here, your father’s knowledge- down there, the collected knowledge of your mother’s people.” OK, maybe he’s reaching a bit with that one. But Alucard still seems to be listening, his lips slightly parted, the petrified look of his body receding. Trevor continues, hoping he has the right words. “As above, so below. Both halves of you, Alucard.”

Sypha is staring at him too, blue eyes wide. The light, still bright and pure with promise, falls unending through the cavernous door.

Trevor reaches out and claps Alucard on the shoulder. “And if you think we’re leaving you to manage all that shit on your own, you’ve got another thing coming, you sulky, half-vampire bastard.”

He’d been prepared to get punched, if he was honest. But Alucard just stares out at the day, and the stoniness seems to fall off him like so much chipped wreckage, rubble left to collect at his feet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trevor is bad with a mop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Thank you so much for reading! I didn't know if people would so it's really cool to have you here <3

"You might have _asked_ me!” Sypha is hissing like an angry goose as the three of them traipse into the bowels of the castle. She and Trevor are a little ways behind Alucard, following him along a steep stone passageway that slopes down like they really are on their merry way to hell.

Trevor folds his arms. “Would you have said otherwise?” There’s that uncomfortable feeling in his belly again, which he ignores. Sypha was the one concerned about Mr Milk-and-Marble in the first place! He was trying to be- well. Nice.

Dear God, you save the world one time and suddenly you’re kissing puppies and shepherding lonely, fucked-up dhampirs. He ought to be made a saint.

“Well,” Sypha admits, “no.”

Before Trevor can say anything satisfying like _“I told you so,”_ Alucard raises his voice. His shoulders have tensed up like a polecat dangled over a river. “Sypha, I would not keep you here. I would not keep either of you here.”

Sypha and Trevor share a long, complicated look. “Alucard-” Sypha begins, apology straining her voice, but he interrupts her.

“No. It was a gesture kindly meant, but it would be- I cannot. I cannot allow it.”

The sulky bastard still won’t turn to look at them, so Trevor takes matters into his own hands. “Careful there. You’ll strain yourself on all that-” fuck, what’s the word, “- _earnestness_.”

Sypha pauses. “I do not think that is a real word.”

“Well, I do!” Trevor retorts.

“It is a real word,” Alucard interjects quietly, his shoulders relaxing a little. He still won’t look at them, though. “Earnestness. Sincerity. And believe me that I am sincere when I say I will not allow you both to remain here-”

“If we don’t will it, yeah, yeah. But-” ugh, all this honesty is practically intolerable; can’t a man get away with one declaration of- of friendly assistance? “- we _do_ will it. Don’t we, Sypha?”

“Of course!” She implores, suddenly anxious to undo the insecurity she planted in their gracious host, and she darts forward to put a hand on Alucard’s shoulder. “I was angry with Trevor because he is a rude idiot-”

Trevor rolls his eyes. So much for gratitude.

“- but I will not abandon you! _We_ will not abandon you. Anyhow, I won’t be letting either of you go anywhere until I have bathed every day for at least two weeks and had a chance to examine the books in that fascinating library of yours.”

“ _Let_ us-”

“Wait, a bath _every day_?”

Sypha laughs again, a true, tired laugh. “Come on. We have prisoners to save.”

But, as it turns out, they don’t. Dracula’s dungeons are empty, the cages unlocked, the bars rusting. Trevor finds himself oddly transfixed by the sight. How many of his ancestors ended their lives down here, shackled and hopeless? He was the first in centuries to have faced Dracula and lived.

_Barely faced him_ , he reminds himself, _you decapitated his hellishly animated corpse_.

The torches set against the stone walls go out as one. Blackness invades Trevor’s senses and he lets out a wordless cry of shock.

“Trevor!” Sypha calls out to him, but he’s too busy writhing against the hand that’s clamped around his wrist.

“It’s me, you idiot.” Alucard’s voice is suddenly very close. Trevor stops struggling. His heart is battering against his ribs. A few feet away, Sypha’s fire flares into life and rises to the ceiling, illuminating the dungeons and the three of them caught in a strange tableau. Alucard drops Trevor’s wrist before peering off into the shadows.

“I can’t see anything,” Sypha whispers.

“There’s nothing here,” Alucard confirms. “But-”

“Yeah. Let’s not linger in the spooky, dark dungeons of Dracula, hm?” Trevor takes several steps back. His natural tendency towards suicidal bravery has completely abandoned him. “I’d even take a bath over this.”

Sypha’s eyes light up. “Yes! Let’s go! Before he changes his mind!”

The three of them retreat back up the sloping passageway. Trevor casts around for something to say that will take his mind off the still-uncomfortable pace of his heart, but Sypha beats him to it.

“You know, we really must do something about all the corpses. They’ll attract rats! This whole place needs cleaning up.”

Alucard’s voice is as dry as dust. “You could say that.”

The journey back up to the entrance hall seems far quicker than the time took to go down, and Trevor can’t tell if that’s just the usual speed that goes with familiarity or if the castle is truly fucking with their senses. Regardless, he’s very glad to emerge back out in the late afternoon light. With enough of the daylight left, he turns to the other two. “So- corpses?”

A tiny spasm crosses Alucard’s face. But he shows no other sign of discomfort. “We should strip them of their armour. It won’t burn.”

“Who even are the ones in armour?” Trevor asks. “I thought Dracula’s servants wore black cowls.” He distinctly remembers fighting some of the bastards only last night.

“They do,” Alucard murmurs, crouching down beside a body sealed in that shiny black plate, “I suspect there was more going on here than we knew.”

After a silence during which it becomes clear Alucard is not about to elaborate, Trevor remarks, “cryptic.”

Sypha makes a strangled noise. The two of them look at her.

“What?”

“Sorry!” Her mouth works, and Trevor realises she’s stifling a laugh. “It’s just- cryptic. _Crypt_ -ic.” And then she bursts into helpless giggles.

Trevor stares at her, bemused.

“I have heard hysterical laughter can be a reaction to traumatic events,” Alucard remarks, “but this is the first time I’ve seen it in person.”

“Fascinating,” Trevor agrees.

Sypha eventually manages to get herself under control. “If you don’t want me to start laughing again, tell us what you think happened here, Alucard.” A tiny snort bursts out of her. “Sorry.”

Alucard looks as though he doesn’t know where to start but decides to pick the path of least resistance. He glances back down at the dead body by his feet. “I wonder if my father’s generals were planning to betray him. The vampires in armour- they were fighting my father’s servants when we came in.”

Huh. “Vampire politics, then?” Trevor had been taught a little in the last year before the house burned. It was deemed a subject for an older boy, one who had grown into some semblance of subtlety. No wonder he’d hated it.

“Something like that,” Alucard replies. He seems disquieted by the idea. Then he bends down and lifts the corpse with no sign of effort. “Let’s take them outside.”

So they do. Alucard gives each of them a loop of twine to pin to the entrance hall. “My father’s castle is still enchanted, even though Sypha broke it-”

“ _Hey_.”

“- and I don’t trust it not to try to ensnare you.”

Trevor _knew it,_ yet still manages to find this information deeply concerning. “Ensnare us?”

Alucard gives him a flat look. “You’re a Belmont. At least half of the architecture here was designed to kill you in improbable and inventive ways.” He presses the twine into Trevor’s hand. “After all the trouble we’ve gone to keep you alive thus far, it would be disappointing to lose you at this stage.”

Trevor looks down at the string in his hand. “Comforting,” he mumbles, then loops one end securely to the bannister. Alucard’s right about one thing, though. It would be embarrassing to die at the hands of some measly trap.

But nothing of consequence seems to happen all day. He retrieves body after body, venturing deeper into the castle with the twine unspooling behind him, encountering not a single smidge of entrapment equipment. It’s rather disappointing really. He remarks as much to Sypha when they’re outside, constructing a pyre in the middle of the grassy wasteland that had once been ornamental lawns. “- no poisoned darts, no crushing bookshelves, not even the slightest _smidge_ of a trapdoor.”

Sypha rolls her eyes. “Do you really think Dracula would have something as basic as a trapdoor?”

“He has a flair for the dramatic,” Trevor says defensively. “Anyway, that’s what I’d do.”

“Remind me never to leave you in charge of security,” Alucard’s cool voice emanates from behind them. He has two corpses over his shoulder and a faint look of distaste on his carven face.

“I think that’s the last of them,” Sypha says. “I don’t think the fighting spread anywhere else.”

“Did either of you smell any more dead bodies?” Trevor asks. It’s a joke, which is why it’s disturbing when they both look blankly at him.

“No,” Sypha says.

“No,” Alucard concurs.

“Right,” Trevor says, and recovers. “Let’s burn these fuckers, shall we?”

Sypha sparks into life. “Stand back.”

Because they’re not idiots, they do as they’re told and watch as she turns the grisly sight into an inferno. Trevor briefly wonders what this would look like to a perfect stranger: three figures arrayed between two mounds of spoils, one burning bright, the other gleaming dully in the fading light of the sun and the hungry flames of the fire. He takes in a breath- then coughs on the acrid smoke.

“Let’s go back inside,” Sypha says gently; and again, because they’re not idiots, they obey.

The sun has set fully by the time they’ve climbed one of the larger turrets. They are mostly silent, locked up in their own thoughts. At least the thick stone walls keep out the smell of the pyre. Alucard eventually stops before an (oversized) wooden door and pushes it open, to reveal an (oversized) bathroom stocked with an (oversized) bath and (oversized) towels.

“The water runs hot from the pipes,” he tells them. Pipes? Trevor wonders. What would you want pipes for in a bathroom? “Sypha, you should go first.”

Sypha’s eyes are very round. “ _Hot_ water?”

For the first time since they crossed the threshold, Alucard gives his familiar inscrutable smile. “Yes. This castle is filled with both horrors and marvels.” Then he inclines his head. “We will step outside.”

Trevor, suddenly realising what’s about to happen, finds a truly astonishing turn of speed and books it back out the staircase, Alucard hot on his heels. The door booms shut behind them. As though by mutual agreement, the two of them lean against opposite walls and regard the stonework with undue fascination. The faint sound of running water sneaks out from the crack in the door.

“So…” Trevor shifts his studious gaze to the torch bracket, “Pipes?”

Alucard gives a very delicate snort. “Of all the things, Belmont-”

From within the bathroom, the sound of the water stops; only to be replaced by a light splash and a moan of satisfaction loud enough to resonate through the door. Trevor and Alucard share a brief, frantic look, before finding yet more interesting inanimate objects to study. On the other side of the door, Sypha subsides into a babble of incomprehensible words, all of which still somehow manage to convey the joy of hot water and bodily pleasure. _Fascinating_ , Trevor muses very loudly in his head, _this rusty nail lying prone by my feet is utterly, immutably fascinating_. He keeps this up until eventually there’s nothing but blessed silence. Only then does he dare look back at Alucard.

Perhaps it’s because he’s been looking so intently at furnishings in a bare tower stairwell for the past god-knows-how-many minutes, but it’s astonishing how many things it’s possible for him to notice about a vampire besides their fangs. Alucard still has a little of that sharp quality hanging around his edges, tension held in the line of his shoulders and the set of his neck. His hair has slid over one shoulder, gleaming palely in the dim light. But it’s not so dark that Trevor can’t see the faint flush staining his cheeks. Pink and gold. It’s flattering, really. Not that anything doesn’t look flattering on the smug streak of misery.

Then Alucard meets his eyes and Trevor realises that Alucard knows he’s been staring. It feels absurdly like being caught. Which is nonsense, plainly. Staring ( _accidental_ staring) isn’t a crime. All the same, he abruptly switches his gaze to the thick rivets set in the door.

“Are you alright?” Alucard sounds faintly amused.

“I’m unsure how this is funny,” Trevor replies, with a great amount of accompanying dignity. “Anyhow, I’m just pondering… the bath. Baths. Bathing. In general.”

“Ah. Is that similar to how man contemplates the stars? The draw of the infinitely unfamiliar?” There it is again, that strange relaxation in the familiarity of insults. It feels good, Trevor supposes. He’s certainly not about to put a stop to it.

“I’m unsure how _you_ are funny. And I’m not unfamiliar with baths. I just don’t need them.”

Alucard makes a funny choking sound. “You don’t need them.”

Trevor rolls his eyes and explains, with what he feels is admirable patience, “Look. I’m a demon-hunter. Cleanliness lets smaller demons through your pores and they climb up to your brain to drive you mad. Everyone knows that. Well-” he casts Alucard an unimpressed look, “- everyone apart from petulant half-vampires with a cross to bear.”

Alucard appears to be fighting an internal battle of epic proportions. Eventually, though, he merely pins Trevor with a cunning look and says, “And Sypha? Is she letting demons into her pores?”

Trevor shrugs. “She’s a magician who can heal herself. Come on, Alucard, I’m not that dumb.”

Alucard pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a gusty breath. Then that faint smile curves ever so slightly across his face. “Absurd as this is, this is actually making me feel better, Belmont.”

“What, bowing to my superior intellect?”

“No.” Alucard gives him a very cool look. “Marvelling at your stupidity.”

“Demons in the pores-!”

“Are a myth.”

“But-!”

“No. No. I will not hear such lunacy preached in this house, Belmont, I can’t allow it.”

“Lunacy!?” Trevor sputters. “How do you think I’ve gone so long without getting sick?”

“Oh.” Alucard goes, if possible, even paler. “You said the last time you were sick-”

“Was eight years ago,” Trevor says, proudly.

Alucard bows his head and presses a hand to his temple.

“Marvelling at my constitution now?” Trevor ribs.

“No,” Alucard mutters faintly, “I’m marvelling that you don’t smell worse than you do. And that’s _after_ the blood, sweat and demon bile of the last two days.”

“I wash! You’ve seen me wash.”

“With a damp flannel and stream water. That is not-”

The door bangs open. Sypha stands triumphantly before them, swathed in a robe and with a towel draped around her shoulders like a blanket. She looks radiant. Her eyes, soft and verging on sleepy, flick between the two of them. “I could have stayed in that bath forever!”

Alucard groans. “Please get this man into hot water before I vomit. He hasn’t had a bath in _eight years.”_

Sypha freezes in place. Then, before Trevor can even think of a witty remark or even an escape route, twin flames lick into life in her palms. “Trevor Belmont. Get into that bath before I singe the ends off your toes!”

Alucard effortlessly wraps a hand around Trevor’s shoulder and propels him through the open door. “In, Belmont. Do not come out again until you have scrubbed off eight years of dirt.”

The door slams shut. To be honest, Trevor is too tired to do anything but make the best of it.

There certainly are plenty of pipes. Trevor has never seen anything like it, all shiny metal and mysterious levers and gleaming white surfaces. It has that same weird feeling of Alucard’s sarcophagus in the catacombs beneath Gresit, both out of place and out of time. There’s a bang on the door. “Turn the taps!” Alucard calls. “At the edge of the bath!”

Huh. Taps. Trevor reaches for the weird looking handles and gives them an experimental twist. They give easily and water starts gushing into the tub. When Trevor dips a cautious hand into the stream, he finds it really is warm. That… that is kind of mind-blowing.

He starts pulling off clothes. God, how long has it been since he last took off his boots? His socks are a sorry state, more hole than fabric by this point. They feel a little crunchy when he peels them off, which is enough to make even the likes of him grimace. Then his hand drifts to the handle of the Morningstar.

It feels strange to at last be putting her down. Like it’s in some way, on some strange level, the final act. The last motion of a month-long battle, the conclusion of the prophecy, an acceptance of events. His heart jumps to his throat. This should be easy. It should be a _relief_.

So why is it so hard?

_Just set her down. She’ll be right here, feet away._

He imagines what Sypha would say if she saw him standing here, paralysed, with Morningstar cradled in his hands. _“You can’t wash with a weapon, Trevor. It will rust!”_

_“Not to mention it could be dangerous,”_ Alucard’s imaginary purr adds. In a hasty movement, Trevor sets the chain on the floor and shucks out of the rest of his clothes. His heart gradually settles back down. Christ. He needs to sleep. Or he needs a drink. Or both.

But he’s got neither of those things; just this gigantic, steaming tub. He supposes he might as well make use of it.

The water is so hot it makes him gasp. Just as he scrambles to turn off the taps, there’s another rap on the door.

“Don’t forget the soap!”

Trevor resists shouting back. It won’t do any good.

Instead he picks up the little round cake sat on the side of the bath and hesitantly starts to lather up. As he’s becoming accustomed to the heat of the water, it becomes more and more comfortable in the steam and gentle scent of the soap. He forgets the stomach-churning, shaky-limbed moments of the previous night; forgets to worry about the Morningstar or whether he’s damaged or whether they can really, possibly have won that easily. He washes until his hair is silken and the water is grey. At last, with his skin flushed and limbs dripping, he clambers out and bundles into a towel. It’s almost disturbingly soft. It seems nigh-on distasteful to put his ragged and spoiled clothes back on, but he doesn’t really have any other option. He doesn’t bother with the red waist cape, belt or leather gardbrace. He just shrugs into his shirt and drags on his trousers before eyeing the disgusting water in the tub.

“Is there a plug?” He yells. “Will these… _pipes_ take the water away?”

“Yes.” Alucard sounds almost bored, “At the end by the taps.”

Pipes. More fucking witchcraft. Still, Trevor fishes around until he finds a bung and pulls it out to let the tub drain.

“Belmont-”

“What?” Trevor has pushed open the door to find Alucard waiting outside. The vampire is alone and still insouciant against the tower wall, although his alabaster forehead creases into a delicate frown as he stares at him.

“I would have found you new clothes.” His nose wrinkles. “Those need to be burned.”

“Absolutely not,” Trevor replies. “Even I know you can wash clothes, Alucard.” He looks up and down the spiralling staircase. “What did you do with Sypha? You didn’t eat her, did you?”

“Hilarious. She grew cold; I showed her to a bedroom.”

Trevor chuckles a little. “As if you could take Sypha anyway.”

Alucard doesn’t dignify that with a response. After a moment’s silence, he makes a careless motion. “Come on. There’s a room for you too, and I _will_ find you clean clothes.” Then he gives Trevor an inscrutable look. “No doubt more comfortable than the ground outside.”

After traipsing up yet more stairs, Trevor has to admit that Alucard’s not wrong. The bed is big enough for three and the mattress looks like it’s stuffed with feathers. His whole body seems to cry out in longing for pillows and linens and a soft, warm quilt.

“I’ll leave you to drool over the counterpane,” Alucard says quietly, and he’s gone before Trevor can even think of a witty retort. And who _cares_ about a witty retort. There’s an honest-to-God, real life feather bed right in front of him and he is going to make good use of it. How long has it been since he last slept on a mattress? Long enough that he can’t remember. He strips off his (pungent, he has to admit) clothes, leaves the Morningstar within reach, and crashes out. The bed is softer than he could ever have imagined, the chill of long emptiness quickly fading. Sleep submerges him faster than thought.

Throughout the night he nearly wakes more than once, feeling as though a weight is pressed on his chest. But when the morning light finally slants through the plate-glass window and Trevor truly opens his eyes, the room is empty and he feels more rested than he has in weeks. Fresh clothes have been placed on the writing desk. When Trevor picks them up, sprigs of dried lavender tumble out. He rolls his eyes. Just what a man wants: to smell like a rich lady’s garden. The garments themselves however are far less offensive than he had feared. Once he’s dressed, he looks much like he normally does- only the shirt is white, not brown, and there’s no high collar. The trousers don’t fit as well, either, but he’s not about to complain. He’s fit to go outside and find a bathroom and food. In that order.

Outside, a piece of twine snakes away down the staircase from its mooring on the door handle.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Trevor sighs, feeling rather like a dog being lead about by a loop of string; but he follows it nevertheless. Getting lost will delay breakfast, and whilst he’ll admit he’s arrogant, he’s not stupid.

Sypha and Alucard are sat at the kitchen table when he arrives downstairs. The fire of yesterday has been banked back up and there’s the delicious smell of roasting meat floating on the warm air. Trevor’s stomach makes a growl loud enough to announce his presence to the other two, who both look up.

“Good morning!” Sypha has a fresh bandage and the glowing look of a person well-rested and well-fed. “We were just wondering whether to wake you.”

Trevor ignores this and crosses to the pot sat cooking above the fire. “What’s in here?”

“Don’t touch it!” Sypha shrieks, whilst Alucard merely tuts.

“He’s never learnt from the past five-hundred times, Sypha. Let the man incur minor burns if he must.”

_Shit, that really is hot_. Trevor snatches his hand back, then tries to maintain his dignity. “Is there any bread?”

“Now he’s trying to change the subject,” Sypha stage-whispers. Trevor grunts before slouching across the kitchens to the bread ovens. Of course, there’s no bread.

“There’s no bread,” Alucard tells him helpfully, “But Sypha is making a stew.”

“You survived the last two days,” Sypha chips in. “You can survive the next few minutes.”

Unwilling to look like a petulant child, but undoubtedly disgruntled, Trevor flops into a chair. “What’s in the stew?”

“Rabbit. There’s a game room behind one of these little doors.”

Trevor’s brow wrinkles. “Vampires like rabbit?”

Alucard doesn’t immediately answer. Trevor looks to Sypha, who shrugs her shoulders. “Alucard thinks there may have been humans in the castle.”

“But the dungeons-”

“I know.” Alucard is frowning into the fire. “And yet… It is not like my father to neglect the details. Was not.”

Those two little corrective words make something flare in Trevor’s gut- something entirely separate from hunger. That’s what they’re all confronted with, isn’t it? A new, unimaginable reality.

After a strained silence, Sypha gently steers the conversation to safer waters. “So… What shall we do today?”

“No more creatures of darkness to vanquish?” Trevor checks.

Alucard revives enough to make a cool remark. “You’re hurting my feelings, Belmont.”

“You are vanquished very easily,” says Sypha, with a wicked smile, “just ask Trevor how he thinks people get the pox.”

Alucard pales even more. “No. Please. Before I am forced to bury him under every book on pathogens in my father’s library just to banish his fairy tales from my ears.”

Trevor scoffs. “You can’t just make up words to sound clever, it won’t work.”

As Alucard buries his face in his hands, Sypha laughs and gets up from the table. “I think it would be good to start cleaning. Making this place truly habitable.” She murmurs a quiet spell and lifts the pot without flinching. “That and getting back down into the museum below.”

Trevor shrugs. “Can’t you just magic us down there?” Granted, he isn’t thinking very clearly. Sypha is spooning stew into wooden bowls and never has anything she’s served up looked quite so appetising. Shockingly, he usually cooked on the road. He was at least very good at skinning the small animals they caught. Perhaps he should have let Sypha do it; it would have saved them a lot of dull meals.

Sypha rolls her eyes. “That is hardly practical. Anyhow, not all the stairs are gone. I’m sure we can make some repairs.”

At that point, the conversation dies down as the three of them start eating. It still confuses Trevor to some extent to watch Alucard eating human food; the part of his brain that was trained in the Belmont hold and schooled on vampires with a whip in one hand and a stake in the other. Trying to wring a satisfactory explanation on how it all works from the dhampir himself is like trying to pin mist to a wall.

The stew, at least, is absolutely delicious.

After breakfast, the three of them set to work. Trevor would normally allow a little more “celebratory alcohol time” after such a significant victory, but there’s nowhere to go and little point in locking himself in the wine cellar. It would look a little too much like sulking. Not to mention the fact that Dracula probably doesn’t have a wine cellar.

After several minutes of cleaning, three things become apparent: this castle is so big, they could scrub a room a day and not be done by next winter; Sypha is as impatient as hell when she can’t use magic (“I am not wasting energy to _clean_ , Alucard!”); and Trevor is the worst mop-wielder the world has ever seen. He is swiftly banished outside to assess the damage to the Belmont hold after drenching Sypha’s skirts (Alucard teleported away before the wave could slosh over his boots, like some temperamental cat unattached to the physical plane) and told not to come back in until he has a plan to fix the stairs. He assumes they’re joking, but they do have a point. As he approaches the yawning hole where the locking slab used to be, the extent of the damage wreaked by demon-battle and mage-spells becomes apparent.

Trevor whistles lowly between his teeth. Then he peers over the edge.

The stone stairs that lead down from the spelled trapdoor have completely gone. He knows enough about magic now to guess that they were only a glamour linked to the enchantment and vanished when the lock was broken by force. What’s left is the great silo of staircases and long-dead Belmont portraits, stretching downward to the shadowy, debris-and-carcass-strewn floor. Sypha’s right: not all of the staircases have been destroyed. If Trevor knew the slightest thing about building staircases, undoubtedly he’d think it an easy job. The trouble is, he knows about as much about staircase construction as he does about mops and is none the wiser on how best to start such a challenging task. At least if you misused a mop, you were unlikely to fall to a mangled and bloody death several hundred feet below.

Still, he had his pride to think of. Let it not be said Trevor Belmont shrank from a fight! If it was time to fight nails and hammer and wood, then so be it.

He says the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next. What he’d initially thought to be a skirmish has turned into an epic battle. He becomes locked in siege with the hold, fighting to be let in whilst gravity (and his lousy carpentry skills) fight equally ferociously to keep him out. He builds test-pieces on the swiftly-growing grass, only for them to fall apart under his weight. He drops tools into the abyss. On one unpleasant occasion, he hammers a nail straight through the pad of his thumb and his yells bring Sypha sprinting out of the castle door.

The other two wage a rather more successful war on the house. Sypha reassembles window panes and burns furniture too damaged to be of any use, whilst Alucard hovers (sometimes literally) over precious artefacts and catalogues the myriad rooms with eerie contents. Trevor has to admit that the vampire doesn’t really look any better than he did right after the battle- not in the way he and Sypha look better, improved by consistent sleep and food and four walls keeping dark-souled beasties far away- but he doesn’t exactly look _worse_. He smiles a little more, at any rate.

It isn’t until they’ve been lodged in the castle for a week that Trevor starts to get a creeping sensation up the back of his neck whenever he’s alone in a room. It reminds him of that first day, when the torches went out in the dungeons as though commanded by some malevolent, cliched force. More and more often, he finds himself whirling around to scan the shadows, convinced he’ll see movement- but finding nothing. He doesn’t mention it to the others. Trevor Belmont is good for one thing, and that’s certainty. He doesn’t get _spooked_.

In the middle of the night, he wakes with his mouth dry. The crushing weight is back, squashing his chest, squeezing away breath. The same clarity he feels in the seconds before a fight surges icy-cold through his veins. His fingers flex, reaching for the Morningstar, and he opens his eyes.

In the darkness, a pair of red eyes are watching him.

“Didn’t you know it’s rude,” Trevor growls, his hand grasping the chain’s comforting handle, “to watch people when they sleep?”

In an instant, the red eyes have gone. The weight flies off, as though it had never been. Silence descends.

_It’s a dream_ , Trevor tells himself, _a very vivid dream. You’ve had these before. Just go back to sleep and you’ll forget it in the morning._

So, he does; but not before he remembers his other waking dream, the one that used to come to him when he was younger- one that smelled like ashes, and tasted like bitter, wormwood loss.

He also doesn’t forget. The dream recurs again and again, until Trevor starts sleeping with the Morningstar under a pillow and half an eye cracked in wary readiness. His temper chips away. He leaves the castle earlier and earlier to avoid the curious gazes of the other two, sure that they’ll be able to see it on him, smell his cowardice and know that Trevor Belmont is menaced by sour memories and bad dreams.

They continue like this until one night he jerks awake again, chest unburdened, red eyes nowhere in sight. Why did he wake-?

The scream from above him comes again, louder this time, and a groggy curse slips out of his mouth as he vaults out of bed and runs for the staircase. That’s _Sypha’s_ voice. He’s never even heard her scream- cry out, yes, swear, undoubtedly, but scream? Not once in the entire blood-soaked journey. A nameless chill saturates his body.

Sypha is trembling in the centre of her room, framed in the doorway, her white nightshirt glowing in the moonlight falling through the window. A river of ice glitters over the edge of the bed, stopping short of her bare toes. Her face is very pale. In the shadows behind her, something fades out of view.

Alucard flashes into being at Trevor’s side, eyes wide and face tense. “What is it?” He asks in a low voice.

She flinches at the question, then whirls to face them. Her expression is a rictus of shock and fear. But when she speaks, her voice barely shakes.

“I saw him. I saw Dracula.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trevor "the little mermaid" Belmont- "fuck, what's the word"  
> Also I'm messing with ideas of period-specific and whatever goes on in my head and maybe canon and maybe not so yeah. Let's just roll with it.  
> Thank you for reading n kudos n comments!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Astonishingly, nobody is actually going mad.

Silence reverberates between the three of them, shivering with emotion in the pallid glow of the moon. Something cracks behind Trevor’s ribs, although he can’t say what it is: perhaps fear, or relief, or a sense of inevitability. It spills up through him like the burn of liquor; like liquor, it loosens his tongue.

“I’ve seen him, too.”

The other two stare at him. Sypha draws herself up a little taller. “When?”

Trevor can’t meet her eyes when he answers. He instead stares at the cascade of ice glittering across the floor of the room, although he can still feel the weight of their expectancy pressing upon him. “Every night this week.” He swallows. “I thought it was a dream.”

Silence descends again. Then Alucard makes a small noise, like a breath half-strangled in the throat. Trevor looks at him, but the dhampir has bowed his head to hide behind the fall of his hair, his shoulders hunched. Nobody moves.

“You can see him too?” Alucard whispers. He holds himself stiffly, face still hidden, and Trevor realises in a flash of comprehension that Alucard has thought, for the past however long, that he’s been going mad.

Well, Trevor knows what that’s like, at least. He too has seen the dead for longer than he’d care to admit, although he knows they truly are just a figment of his imagination.

“He is dead,” Sypha says, although she doesn’t sound very certain. “We all-”

“How about we discuss this in the kitchen?” Trevor cuts across her. The cold and the darkness are getting to him, along with the fact that Alucard still won’t look at either of them. Indeed, at Trevor’s suggestion the dhampir turns fully away and leaves without a backwards glance.

And, because that’s what they always do, they follow him.

The kitchen is warmer and feels far safer than the ghoul-infested tower. The three of them crowd around the hearth whilst Trevor piles on the last of the logs. They’ll have to get some more from somewhere- he supposes he’s well within his rights to fell a tree, given that they’re on his land, but he hasn’t ever had occasion to chop down anything that didn’t have four legs and a snarl. Or they could go into the valley, down to the market in Arnem. Trevor wonders if anybody would even recognise him, all these years later. The thought is a strange mixture of liberating and sad.

When the fire is blazing again and some of their shock has melted away in the face of the flames, Sypha finds her voice.

“I know we killed him. I know we did! I’m sure of it. Whatever this is, it is not Dracula.”

“Sure felt like him,” Trevor points out, “and how many eight-foot tall, red-eyed, black-cowled bastards can there be in Wallachia?”

Sypha glares at him. “You are not helping.”

“I don’t intend to _help_.” The final word snaps from behind his teeth with unexpected force; the leash he’s been trying to keep on his temper is fraying to a dangerous extent. “I intend to avoid the three of us dying because we underestimated-”

“It is him,” Alucard says, quietly, and his voice, usually silky smooth, is roughened almost beyond recognition. “Or at least… an imprint of what he once was.”

He’s been crying, Trevor realises, crying silently whilst they crept through the castle and built up the fire and bickered over the death-or-not of his genocidal dad. The realisation drops an unexpected lead weight right through his stomach. He didn’t even know vampires could cry.

Sypha looks concerned too. “Alucard-”

“I should have realised something like this would happen.” The vampire doesn’t appear to have heard her, still talking in that sandpaper voice, “after all, he was one of the most magical beings to exist for centuries.”

“Is that how it works?” Trevor asks, rather diplomatically he thinks, although Sypha still shoots him a glare.

Alucard blinks. “How what works?”

“Being magic makes you a ghost?”

Sypha’s frustration crumbles in the face of her endless fond exasperation. She rolls her eyes. “Trevor Belmont, the new magical theoretician. _Being magic makes you a ghost_.”

“He isn’t precisely wrong.” Alucard finally raises his head, staring into the fire. His eyes are slightly swollen, but other than that he shows no signs of emotional turmoil, or even particular discomfort. His expression is one of intense contemplation. “Using magic to the extent my father did… Did you ever read of the Greek sorceress who never died?”

Trevor stretches. Inexplicably, all this talking is starting to make him relax. “Not one of my bedtime stories, no.”

“Nor mine,” Sypha replies, slowly. She looks perplexed. Fair play- if Speakers are known for one thing, it’s their fondness for stories. Look at all that chattering when they were in Gresit, literally moments away from dying a horrible death at the hands of Dracula’s horde. Funny how Trevor can almost look back on that as a good memory. These times are nothing if not strange.

Alucard quirks the corner of his mouth in what Trevor now knows to be his equivalent of a crooked smile. “You wouldn’t, Sypha. The witch was one of your own.”

“A Speaker?” Now Trevor’s intrigued. Sypha, on the other hand, bristles.

“What are you implying?”

“It was for good reason,” Alucard raises his hand in a placatory gesture, “given that any mention of her name was said to have the power to strengthen her spirit enough to allow her to return. From what I read, in life she was an exceptionally powerful and wise Speaker-magician who resided on a Greek island. When she died, however, she did not depart the mortal realm, although she did apparently become rather… unhinged. In life, as I said, she was wise and kind, but in death, she was…”

“A bitch?” Trevor offers. He knows how these stories go. Never before has hearing one made ice slide into his belly, though. Dracula in life was quite enough _unhinged_ to be going on with.

“Indeed,” Alucard demures.

Sypha voices what they’re all thinking. “Alucard- that is not encouraging.”

Silence falls again. Dawn can’t be far off. Maybe even now the birds have lifted their heads, preparing to begin their song.

“We need to know what he’s capable of,” Alucard says quietly. “Evidently he has been manifesting more strongly with the passing of time. If he keeps growing stronger…”

Trevor clears his throat. “How exactly do you get rid of a ghost?”

“A binding spell,” Alucard replies, “and no, I do not know how to cast one.”

“That is a bridge to cross when we burn it,” Sypha reassures them both with her peculiar turn of phrase, before covering a cavernous yawn behind a dainty hand. “What shall we do now?”

“Sleep?” Trevor suggests. His voice creaks a little as he settles further into the high-backed chair, speech settling into comfortable patterns of near-exhaustion regardless of ghosts and binding spells and bridges to burn. “I for one am relieved to be still in possession of my sanity, despite ample evidence to the contrary.”

Alucard catches his eye from the other side of the hearth. Something about the way his irises gleam liquid gold in the hungry firelight makes Trevor’s heart catch against the inside of his chest. There’s a strange kind of fervency in his expression, something that speaks to an emotion that Trevor doesn’t understand: gratitude, maybe, or sudden insight. Yet he sounds perfectly calm when he says, “I agree.”

Sypha shrugs. “Well, I suppose we have slept in worse places.”

The unspoken decision to stay here, in the warmth and friendly light and perhaps even the comforting presence of each other, goes unacknowledged. It feels too… Too much, maybe, as though to speak of their bond would make it present around the fireside, a large and potentially unwelcome fourth member of their party. The twitch of dependency settles on Trevor’s skin like the itch of a fly. But before he can try to brush it away, he’s asleep.

He wakes much later, feeling groggy and stiff. Just a few nights of a featherbed have started to make him soft- after all, he can easily recall a time when a chair had been a welcome respite for a vagabond like himself.  His joints crack quietly as he pushes himself upright, blinking steadily whilst he orientates himself. The light is low again: the fire has burned down and, of course, there are no windows in the kitchen. It must be hours since they fell asleep. Sypha is curled up like a cat at the foot of the great table. She has her head resting on Alucard’s feet; Alucard himself is prone in the other chair, his eyes closed and mouth hanging slightly open. Trevor looks down at them for a long moment before treading quietly to the door and stepping out. Honestly, before things like planning and not-dying begin, they all need some clothes.

The silence in the rest of the castle is bordering on oppressive. The sunshine of the previous days has been smothered by a blanket of cloud that has rolled in from the west, and even those corridors with windows are bathed in drab light that seems far too friendly to the shadows. Any torches have burned low; any lamps have gone out. A prickle goes all the way up Trevor’s spine as he steps into the entrance hall: the sensation of being unwelcome is overpowering.

“Oh, fuck off,” he growls irritably, which turns out to be the wrong thing to say.

The entire room gives an ominous, creaking shudder- as though a giant has reached out a hand and jerked the castle to and fro like a cat shakes a mouse- and the flagstones beneath his feet dissolve. With a lurching cry, Trevor plummets downwards, his limbs flailing as he frantically tries to catch hold of anything that will slow his descent. He catches hold of something- a beam, maybe?- and clings to it with all his frantic strength. His pulse races in his ears, suddenly electrified by the prospect of a fight. Because surely that must be coming next, right? He’s about to fight Dracula all over again- only this time, he’s alone.

But nothing comes. He hangs there in the cavernous space between cogs and machinery with only the sound of his rasping breath for company, seeing no movement, sensing no enemy threat. He chances a glance down and grimaces. The remaining distance is so great that he can’t see the bottom. Or perhaps this is one of Dracula’s little jokes: you never hit the bottom, just fall and fall forever.

From high above there’s a yell of panic. “Trevor!”

“I’m OK!” He calls up. Distant sounds of running footsteps come to an abrupt halt and two faces peer over the edge of the hole.

“That does not look like “OK”!” Sypha points out, fear evident in her voice. “How are we going to get you out?!”

Trevor’s hand flies to his hip and a little moan of relief escapes him. The Morningstar is still there, belted on in his haste last night. The hilt feels like a comfort in his hand, like the neck of a bottle after a long, hard day. Only instead of offering oblivion, it offers survival.

“Don’t worry,” he manages (his shoulder is starting to protest against bearing his whole weight), “give me a second-”

He flicks out the length of the chain and launches it for the nearest wheel, letting the anchor bite before letting go of the beam and swooping through the air. Suddenly back in flight after so many days left sedentary, the rush of it leaves him feeling almost giddy; he can’t help the whoop that escapes him as he’s left in the thrall of flight, leaping ever upwards until he bounds over the jagged stone to land back in the entrance hall. Something is also happening to his face. It’s possible he might be grinning.

Sypha is looking at him dubiously. “This is not a normal reaction to almost falling to your death.”

“What?” Trevor swings his arms, coiling the chain of the Morningstar lovingly through his hands. “I feel great! Call that a trapdoor?!” He raises his voice to the room at large. “Pathetic!”

Alucard places a delicate hand to his forehead. “Please stop.”

Sypha, in contrast, looks as though she’s putting two and two together. Before he can blink, he’s caught in the beam of her shrewdest look. “How did you trigger this, exactly? After all, you’ve walked through here plenty of times before.”

Trevor freezes, then his face falls back to normal. He briefly (briefly!) considers telling her it’s a side-effect of the broken castle, but swiftly realises that firstly she would know that better than he did, and secondly she can usually tell when he’s lying. He sighs with the kind of gravity only the petulant can achieve, and admits:

“I told Dracula to fuck off.”

It’s Alucard’s turn to pause. Then he says, in a tone of amused disdain, “You know, I used to wonder how a scion of a noble house, skilled in combat and courageous to a fault ended up slumped in a gutter with nothing to his name but the cloak on his back. And then- I remember.”

Trevor’s initial reaction is to be pissed; but then, unexpectedly, he remembers Sypha’s plea back in the library, how she’d taken him aside and asked him if he really had to rise to every sharp remark sent his way. Remembers her laughter at the story behind his name. Remembers the two of them slouched beneath a dusty old sheet and her little speech about sadness and retaliation and the differences she saw in the two of them. And honestly- this is Alucard. Can he even be bothered?

He decides that no, he can’t. And if he sets aside his pride for a moment (difficult, but possible), he can appreciate the irony. A bit. A very tiny bit.

So instead of biting back with words intended to cut, he simply gives the ceiling a pointed glare, then rolls his shoulders back. “Don’t swear at Dracula. Noted. Any more bright ideas?”

“Yes.” Alucard does that freaky disappearing act just to annoy him, and reappears beside Trevor’s right shoulder. “You’re bleeding. Try not to get it on the floor- I don’t know the extent of a ghost’s appetite.”

Oh. He has a point- Trevor must have caught a chunk of debris on the way down because there’s a tear in his night-shirt and a small bloom of red staining the material.

“Come on,” Sypha sighs, taking his wrist as though she anticipates resistance, “let’s go patch you up. Then we really all ought to get dressed. I don’t fancy fighting Dracula in my night-things!”

They do not fight Dracula in their night-things. Instead, they dress, eat and follow Alucard about the castle with more of those fucking strings before night truly sets in. The vampire’s concern about getting lost seems to be verging on paranoia, but Trevor has to admit that after his run-in with a Belmont trap this morning he’s a little more inclined to heed his warnings. He’s had his wound dressed by a tutting Sypha but he’s resolved to not put the Morningstar down until this nasty little adventure is over and done with. God knows how he’d have got out of that pit without it. Alucard would have had to have teleported down to rescue him- the humiliation doesn’t bear thinking about.

After that, they plan. They plan for what feels like a really long fucking time, and much of the talking seems to go round in circles. Noncorporeal opponents don’t really lend themselves to cohesive battle strategy, turns out. The only concrete idea they leave the room with is that Trevor is going to be the bait, because “he’s a Belmont. Sorry, Trevor, but he’s going to come for you first.”

Well, they’re not wrong. Which is why Trevor is ambling along a meandering path through the castle, hands clasped behind his back, metaphorically whistling a cheerful tune. He actually can’t whistle, but that’s beside the point. _Come and get me_ , his whole demeanour says, _come and get me, you vampire bastard._ Stationed in a remote corner of the castle, Sypha and Alucard await his signal.

Nothing happens until he’s sauntering through a long windowless gallery, walled with books and strange objects in glass cases. It’s a room Trevor isn’t familiar with, illuminated by those never-dimming torches set at intervals way above his head and carpeted with some kind of material that dulls the sound of his footsteps. So when those lamps go out as one, the darkness feels unnaturally oppressive. Trevor’s senses dial all the way up, straining to hear something, scanning uselessly back and forth- but already aware of the uncomfortable chill cloaking his skin. “Here we go,” he mutters, before gleaming red eyes flare into being at the other end of the gallery and a noise like the screams of the damned tears into his eardrums.

“SYPHA! ALUCARD!” Trevor bellows. Perhaps they should have thought of a better signal. No going back now though- the red eyes are almost upon him.

The skirmish is by far the strangest Trevor has been involved with. He never gets a good look at his opponent: whether because of the darkness or the speed of the blows he can’t tell. All he’s aware of is the fight, immersed totally in the physicality of it, fear and roaring dominance surging within him and for once not opposed but working in a eerie, disturbing melody.

“ _No!_ ”

Fire blooms over their heads, the wash of heat strangely clean compared to the freezing darkness that had proceeded it. Sypha is silhouetted beneath the inferno. Even as Trevor whirls past he can see that her face is set with terrible determination. And if Sypha is here…

The great white wolf bounds forward, silver sword clutched between its jaws. Trevor slides to a halt, panting a little, the Morningstar whipping back towards him like an old friend. “Glad you could make it,” he manages, before a writhing mass of shadows coalesces into a ball between them in a deeply ominous way. Trevor raises his arm to attack, but with a hideous, wheezing shriek, the shadows explode into consuming darkness and he’s knocked flat on his back. His head rings from the impact.

“You will not have them!” Sypha sounds as though she’s still standing, still defiant- but then Trevor’s heart stalls as she gives a pained cry.

“No,” he mutters, his tongue thick and mouth bloody, “no-”

“Alucard!” The panic in Sypha’s voice makes his own heart pound. He struggles back to his feet and sees a sight that chills his blood.

Alucard is lying prone on the other side of the gallery, wolf no longer, his face white and dazed as he feebly tries to recover. A black shape towers over him. Trevor can feel the menace rolling off the thing; it roils in his gut, like the stench of demon-death.

“ _You_ …” The thing whispers and Trevor can’t help but retch, the sound is in the air and inside him, buzzing like a swarm yet still recognisably…

“Father-” Alucard wheezes. The look on his face is one of pain as he gazes up at the shape that was once Count Dracula.

The figure raises a fist.

Trevor is running before he can even think about it. The Morningstar swings out from his fist, parting the air with the sting of retribution. The sharp-edged tip hisses as it lodges into the mass of shadows.

Nothing happens for the space of a heartbeat.

Then the monster turns and Jesus, if Dracula was hideous in life it’s nothing to how he looks in death, somehow simultaneously withered and swollen with black wisps of matter moving under whatever he’s using for skin, those terrible red eyes burning out of his face and alighting on Trevor with something akin to malicious glee.

“ _You cannot hurt me, Belmont_ ,” the vampiric-ghost-nightmare promises, advancing with a horrible crawling shuffle, smiling around inch-long fangs. The tip of the Morningstar falls to the floor with a dull thud. “ _Nothing can_.”

Then he rears back and strikes.

Trevor falls. He falls through ice and fire and darkness unending. Then there’s light so bright it blinds him, and screams, and the sensation that all his skin is cringing off his body. And he’s still falling, he’s falling back and then he hits the carpet with Dracula’s ghost still looming over him.

He can’t be sure, but apart from the general disquieting sensations, he thinks he might actually be unhurt.

The next blow is over quicker, and the next, and the next. His hearing starts to return. He becomes aware of Sypha yelling, yelling his name.

“I’m-” _OK_ , he means to say, but then he realises that Dracula’s talons are passing _through_ him and fuck that is the weirdest thing he’s ever seen, he might be sick-

Then Alucard has launched himself into the fray, only he just ends up flying through Dracula’s chest to land sprawling on the other side of Trevor, his face contorting as he presumably experiences the intense mental fuckery that occurs when you plunge through the ectoplasm of a non-corporeal being.

Dracula turns with a savage snarl, and Trevor finds that he feels much better when not being punched by a ghoul.

_“What is this?”_ The vampire hisses in fury. Trevor hops back to his feet, then abruptly ducks under a fireball lobbed by Sypha.

“Sypha!” He bellows, suddenly envisaging the whole castle going up in flames around them. “Stop!”

“ _What_?!”

Alucard groans from the floor.

“ _Die, Belmont_.” Dracula sneers.

“Oh, for fuck’s-” Trevor dodges again, this time the raking scratch of talons. “ _Stop_! He can’t hurt us!”

As though to prove his point, Dracula attempts to grab him by the throat, which merely results in the ghost overreaching himself and nearly stumbling (as much as a ghost can stumble) and Trevor pulling a face like a child swallowing vinegar at the redoubling of the unpleasant sensation. “Fucking _stop_ that!”

There’s a rather shocked silence.

Dracula stares down at his own hands like a man (vampire? Ghost?) betrayed.

“ _No_ …”

Then he’s gone. Up on the walls, the never-dimming torches flicker back on. The room once more feels like… just a room.

Sypha runs to them. At least, that’s what Trevor surmises: his brain feels watery and strange, unable to quite keep track of what’s happening around him. It makes him feel vulnerable. But then Sypha is by his side, smelling of singed hair and lavender, propping him up on slender yet steady shoulders. He tries to say something but realises that his tongue is swelling where he bit it in the fight earlier and oh yes, brain made of water- so what comes out is a garbled sort of grunt, instead.

“Sit down,” Sypha tells him, worry evident in her tone, helping him down to the floor. “You were hit so many times- and Alucard- Alucard?”

Trevor looks over to see the vampire still pressed face down in the carpet. Is he breathing? Yes, he’s breathing. Breathing and shaking all over like a leaf in high wind. Sypha crosses to him and lays a cautious hand on his shoulder; the gentle touch still makes his whole body flinch. Trevor doesn’t understand. He can’t be-

“Are you hurt?” Sypha is a little demanding now, hiding very real fears behind a wall of brashness. Trevor crawls on ungainly legs to sit beside them. He’s not sure what he can do, but he’s pretty sure he should do _something_.

At last, Alucard turns his head. “No. I’m not injured.”

He appears- shocked, maybe, or perhaps withdrawn so far into himself that barely a flicker of life shows in his amber eyes. His face once again has that inhuman, carven quality that once made him seem so untouchable. Now, though, it just makes him look dead. He’s still trembling.

“Been a lot today,” Trevor says muzzily. Damn. That was supposed to sound wise. Instead, he sounds like a drunk pressed into his pillow. The fight with the ghoul might not have hurt, but he’s still exhausted. _More_ exhausted. He’s thinking and saying words without really realising. “If that fucker wakes me up again tonight…”

Sypha laughs a little and takes his hand in that same simple, easy way she had after the _first_ time they thought they’d killed Dracula.

“We definitely killed him,” Trevor continues to mumble, noticing idly that Sypha has also taken Alucard’s hand and the vampire is not resisting, “no real reason to worry, he can’t kill us back.”

Alucard heaves a breath. Then he fixes Trevor with a stare that would probably mean something, if Trevor’s mind hadn’t been passed through the wringer and finished off with a sieve. “Did you bite your tongue?”

Trevor frowns. “Why?”

Alucard is still breathing deeply, like a swimmer come up for air, and Sypha answers for him. “Because you sound like you tried to swallow a wasp and you have blood coming out of your mouth.”

Trevor curiously wipes the back of his free hand across his lips and finds that yes, she’s right.

“You look rather like a vampire, actually,” Alucard points out, with something of his familiar disdain, and for some reason this is funny to Trevor, so funny that he lets out a bark of laughter. And then that laughter feels so good, strangely, deeply good that he keeps going, basking in the mirth that builds and builds inside him until he’s flat on his back, laughing like he hasn’t in years.

The other two are with him, drifting through the dim, simple humour of it: Sypha’s infectious giggles mingling with Alucard’s rare sharp chuckles. They’re _alive_ ; they’re fucking alive, despite everything, because of everything, children playing in the monster’s castle and the monster can’t touch them ever again. Trevor thinks of the sunrise that’s coming. He thinks of Sypha’s hand still warm in his. He thinks of the coppery taste of blood in his mouth and how they are still safe, how they put themselves in harm’s way to protect him and how he did the same. They are alive.

For the first time in a very long time, Trevor appreciates just how fully he wants it to remain so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do not swear at Dracula's ghost, it hurts his feelings.
> 
> Seriously thank you for all the love! <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old wounds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello yes 100 kudos wow wow wow wow! 
> 
> Posting regularity will decay a bit now, life be stressful. Hope you enjoy this chap though <3

Trevor wakes steadily, calmly. Very faint light is filtering in past the drapes, pale with the barest promise of dawn. He can hear steady breathing close by. Cautiously, he turns over and takes in strange, comforting scene.

Sypha is curled up at the foot of the bed, rolled up tightly with her arms wrapped over her chest like a child seeking security. Her head rests on a pillow; she’s still fully dressed despite burrowing beneath the thick quilt; her face is slack and peaceful beneath a mussed halo of amber curls. Trevor turns his head and sees a second figure on the far side of the mattress, also wrapped in the covers and hidden by a mass of pale hair. Neither of them are touching, but the distance between them isn’t so great that such an impulse would be impossible. Trevor distantly recalls the grogginess both he and Alucard suffered the previous night, recalls how Sypha had insisted that they all stay together. Then he recalls how _he_ had insisted they sleep in a bed.

In his defence, he had been very unsteady and semi-conscious at best. This is only partly his fault.

Looking at the both of them, though, safe and sound and sleeping just feet away, it’s hard to drum up much guilt. It reminds him of being young and playing guard whilst his sisters traded secrets and sugarplums behind their parent’s backs: there’s that same sense of responsibility, potent and glowing in his chest.

And it’s far too early to wake them, anyway. They’re warm, they’re getting some much-needed sleep- that outweighs Trevor’s scruples, right? Anyway, he’s hardly about to-

“Shut up, Belmont,” he mutters softly to himself, then settles back into the comfortable softness, ready for sleep to envelop him once more. If his swiftly-fogging brain conjures up images of arms that shelter and a mane of hair to bury his face in, if it makes his chest ache in a strangely sweet way…

Well, nobody need ever know.

He is next awakened by a pillow to the face and all dreams, inappropriate or otherwise, are chased out of his head. Bleary-eyed and scowling, he sits up to find Sypha laughing merrily with the offending weapon clutched in her hands.

“You sleep like a bear,” she tells him cheerfully. “Come on, I’m bored and Alucard is restless.”

The dhampir, wearing his black coat and a disinterested expression, looks over from where he’s pacing by the door.

“I am not.”

Trevor swings his legs out of bed and yawns wide enough to make his jaw crack. At least his tongue feels mostly healed. “Well, you sleep like a hedgehog.”

Sypha puffs up with indignation, although her eyes are still smiling. “I do not!”

Alucard pauses. “You do.”

Trevor grins slyly at her, pleased to have found another way to make the pair of them laugh. “All curled up in a little ball.”

She springs to her feet. “You take that back!”

“She has prickles, too,” Alucard remarks, shooting Trevor a thinly-veiled smirk, and it’s so _weird_ , so at odds to everything they’ve been through- yet Trevor will never complain about it, never in a thousand years.

“You are both horrendous,” Sypha glares, although the effect is rather spoiled by the twitch of her lips. “Now get up and get dressed. Alucard has something to show us.”

Trevor follows his orders, then the dhampir as the three of them track through more of the castle’s endless corridors. Eventually, though, they come to a familiar landmark: the charred tunnel that cuts through the navel of the great keep, relic of the fireball explosion, a last remnant of the battle that they haven’t yet managed to repair. Alucard leads them inside. Gradually, light peters into the passageway, flickering strangely as though caught by water.

The room at the end is tall and cylindrical, formed of both ground floor and graceful balustrade, and lined with bookcases and graceful windows. It is two things: beautiful and ruined. Besides the ten-foot tall hole bored in the wall, there are also broken shelves, scattered pages and splintered railings around the upper balcony onto which they’ve carefully stepped. The dancing effect of the light comes from an eerie, drifting cloud of broken glass, suspended in the centre of the room in a billowing, glittering cloud. Trevor eyes it a little suspiciously- in his experience, things so blatantly magical often mean trouble- but Alucard, standing just ahead of them, doesn’t look afraid. He simply seems… quiet.

“Alucard,” Sypha whispers softly, “what is this place?”

“My father’s library.” His voice is low and distant as he treads between the wreckage, eyes fixed on some point invisible to those in the present. “It was my library too, when I was a boy.”

Sypha and Trevor follow him cautiously along the perimeter of the room. A silence comes upon them: a silence that reminds Trevor of childhood Sundays spent in church. It’s respectful, almost reverent. He tries to picture Alucard as a boy, ringleted and neat, scampering around in a never-ending hunt, satisfying an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The image lodges an uncomfortable weight in his stomach. A tiny child, as yet innocent, who would grow up to become- a messiah? A killer? In a strange, wavering moment, Trevor is unsure which really means more.

They traverse a ladder to the tiled floor, skirting the edges of the glass cloud, before Alucard stops and stares up at a ragged hole torn in the ceiling.

“This is where we fought,” he intones, as though reading an account of events that happened to somebody else, “the first time. I thought I was destined to stop him.”

Trevor suddenly remembers the keep of the sleeping soldier, remembers the angular form rising from the coffin and the gruesome scar rent across his chest; realises, for the first time, just how severe the injury must have been to inflict such damage on a man with vampire blood in his veins, who healed seemingly grievous wounds in the blink of an eye. He thinks of his own father, a stern, grim man, and tries to imagine him turning on his own son with such savagery. He can’t.

“You were,” Sypha murmurs, but her eyes are very wide. Trevor wonders if she too is thinking of the fight they were never part of. Does Alucard even now still carry the marks?

“I didn’t know what I was doing.” Alucard continues as though he hasn’t heard her, still gazing upwards. “I still don’t.”

The admission falls between them: a bald, squalling truth, demanding attention yet provoking a kind of revulsion that Trevor’s almost ashamed by. Because they _don’t_ know what they’re doing, do they? A hunter; a drunk. A messiah; a killer. A magician; a child. Two sides of the same spinning coin, lurching downwards through the winds of fate. Alucard’s hands, hanging by his sides, draw up into fists. He seems to be steeling himself for something.

“I want answers,” he mutters to himself, before drawing himself straight up and fixing his gaze on the spiralling mirrored shards. His voice rings out suddenly, a clarion call. “ _Father_! Answer me!”

The whole room seems to freeze. Trevor feels rooted to the spot. Then he remembers that he too has a voice. “Are you fucking _kidding_ me?” He manages to hiss, even as Sypha forms an expression that conveys equal volumes of incredulity and horror. “We just got rid of the bastard-!”

“Father!” Alucard raises his voice even louder, and Trevor suddenly recognises the restrained fury bubbling just below the surface, roiling and spitting with the heat of molten metal. “Vlad Dracula Tepes! _Answer me_.”

“Alucard, no!” Sypha cries- but she’s too late. With a force like a gale slamming into a wall, the black cloud of shadows materialises in the centre of the room, sending the glass haze scattering in all directions before recoalescing into a shape Trevor recognises. _It’s a mirror_ , he realises, _a magic mirror._ Then he’s being punched by a ghost again and his observation skills take a back seat for a while.

Really, it’s not so bad. The effect of Dracula’s blows seems to only lessen over time- Trevor would now liken it to dropping into a particularly chilly river on a miserable day rather than anything actually painful- but the ghost’s ferocity has not abated. Trevor gives up dodging. Honestly, he suspects it pisses his opponent off more. That’s worth suppressing a few shivers of revulsion. Even Sypha doesn’t yell or fling icicles. The two of them are prepared to wait it out.

Alucard, however, is not.

“ _Leave him_.”

For a brief, disorientating moment, Trevor can’t tell whether it’s Alucard or Dracula who’s spoken. But then the ghoul stills- and, impossibly, obeys. The two vampires, alive and dead, face one another across the floor. The sight of Alucard fairly makes the hair on the back of Trevor’s neck stand up.

The dhampir’s eyes are ruby-red and shining. His fangs are bared, claws unsheathed, muscles bunched as though ready to pounce. All of the calm-water, empty-room stillness has been burned away; in its place is an anger so fierce it looks like agony. His face is caught in the rictus of a snarl. Dracula, now converted into his mockery of a physical form, stares down at him as though transfixed.

“ _You_ …”

“What do you want?” Alucard hisses. His fingers flex like his itching to lash out. “Was everything you did in life not enough?!”

“This does not feel like a good idea,” Trevor mutters under his breath, glancing sideways at Sypha. She, however, is staring straight ahead, her eyes wide. At first, he thinks it’s the confrontation that’s drawn her attention, but…

Her hand shoots out and grabs at his sleeve. “Look!”

He searches for what she’s seen- and then the breath stops in his throat.

The mirror is not showing the scene in front of them. It reflects two figures, true, and one is Dracula. But it is Dracula as he once was: proud and stern, black hair swept back from his forehead. He is gazing down at someone reflected in Alucard’s place- but that person is not Alucard. It’s a woman. She is straight and slender, with sandy blonde hair passed over one shoulder, wearing simple travelling clothes. In her hand is a plain dagger with a leather-wrapped pommel.

_She showed up at my father’s castle and banged on the front door with the pommel of her dagger…_

The woman is looking up at Dracula with an expression so tender that Trevor almost feels embarrassed to be witnessing it. He can’t remember ever seeing someone look at anything with so much naked affection. There is but one possible conclusion: this is Alucard’s mother. She has to be.

“Look!” Sypha says again, and this time she catches the tiniest flicker of Alucard’s attention. At the same time, the image in the mirror stirs into motion. The woman- Lisa Tepes- steps forward, smiling, and takes Dracula’s hand. The movement distracts both the dhampir and the ghoul. They turn in unison to stare at the reflection.

Alucard rocks back as though he’s been struck. He seems transfixed; petrified, like the mirror is showing a cyclops and not a moving memory of his parents, once upon a happier time. His fists clench, then relax. But his reaction is nothing compared to Dracula’s. The ghoul is staring like he’s found something long-lost and long-forgotten, a treasure so precious that its absence was too painful to even recall more joyous memories.

“ _Lisa_ …”

For the first time, Dracula’s voice doesn’t twist inside Trevor’s guts like a poisonous smoke. It sounds almost… alive.

Alucard stays silent. He’s drinking in the sight of his mother.

 _“What did I do, Lisa?”_ Dracula whispers. He asks in the tone of one who already knows the answer; who already knows of a thousand wrongs and shattered promises. The ghoul’s eyes are half-closed as they leak shadows in a strange imitation of tears. In the mirror, Lisa Tepes is laughing up at her husband, carefree and whole.

Trevor had almost forgotten that amongst all this, she was a woman who had lived and breathed; but he remembers now. The weight of that understanding stills his tongue. It turns his thoughts to his own mother, the woman who watched him chase the dogs under her feet and wiped his wounds when he fell down. Her life had been stolen, too.

“She only ever wanted things to be better,” Alucard says, in a strained, soft voice. He can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the mirror. “Better for everyone.”

Dracula’s ghost bows his head.

“You failed her,” Alucard continues, a little of the fire beginning to creep back into his tone. “You betrayed her.”

 _“It is so hard to remember…”_ Dracula raises a hand in hideous imitation of his living reflection, reaching for Lisa’s face.

“Genocide? Hellish hordes? Any of that ringing a bell?” Trevor can’t help himself. His voice is restrained, cool, even, the way he likes to antagonise an opponent before the fight. “Laying waste to the human population of Wallachia?”

Dracula pauses. “ _Belmont…”_

“Think we’ve established that,” Trevor growls, “and hit me all you like, it’ll do fuck all. You’ve got no power now, Dracula, just like those poor sods you terrorised and murdered for _love_.”

The contempt in his final words fairly drips into the surrounding air. A silence hums between the four of them like the empty vibrations of a struck bell.

“Alucard is right.” Sypha’s words are tense but determined. She stares at the scene before them with shining eyes, unshed tears threatening to spill down her pale face. Her eyes are fixed on Lisa. “She would be ashamed of you.”

Trevor doesn’t know what to expect. More violence, maybe, or even rage. But Dracula doesn’t move. The mirror steadily begins to break apart, light spilling through the cracks as the shards separate and resume their haunting murmuration. The faces of Dracula and Lisa Tepes fade from view.

Between one blink and the next, and with a sigh like wind in a pine forest, Dracula’s ghost disappears.

“Has he gone?” Sypha whispers. She reaches up to wipe her eyes hastily, as though afraid either of them will see her weep.

Alucard sags where he stands, head still upturned to watch the mirror’s endless dance. “He will never truly leave. He is tied to this place as much as I am.”

Trevor frowns. “On the bright side, _you’re_ not dead.”

Alucard startles into a laugh: a morose, dull thing, but a laugh nonetheless. “True.”

“And he can’t hurt us,” Trevor points out. It’s strange to find himself in the position of optimist, but the other two clearly aren’t up to the job at the moment, and from where he’s standing, there’s no need for total despair. After all, they’ve been there, done that and carved their name into the mile marker that reads “certain doom”. They can handle a ghost. Even an emotionally traumatic one.

Sypha, however, shakes her head.

“Oh, Trevor. The wounds on the inside are the ones that take longest to heal.”

Trevor gives her a sideways look. “You don’t mean infection, do you.”

Finally, she laughs, a little tremulously. Then she glances back at Alucard, biting her lip. “No. That isn’t what I mean at all.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Alucard says, as though he’s not heard them- and Trevor’s had enough.

“I do!” He announces. “Come on. Let’s take a break from this live-in séance for five minutes, shall we? I’ve got a tree we need to chop down.”

That’s sort of a lie, actually, but the other two only find that out after they’re halfway down the front steps, when Sypha asks which direction they’re going in. Trevor just shrugs.

“No idea,” he says, cheerfully. Already the fresh air is lifting his spirits. “But we need firewood, right? There’s got to be decent tree somewhere around here.”

Alucard shoots him a look. “We don’t even have an axe.”

“We have Sypha!” Trevor protests. “You can chop down a tree, right?”

Already the colour is returning to their magician’s face, but she furrows her brow. “I suppose I could…”

“There you go,” Trevor says briskly, before striding the rest of the way down the stairs. “This way!”

A stiff wind is gusting from the east, rustling the branches of the budding trees that march away down into the steep valley below. The forest has grown up in the years Trevor has been away, sending saplings out over the grounds of the Belmont Mansion and encroaching ever further onto the paths it had once been their duty to maintain. Unfortunately, Trevor had never been included on those expeditions; felling trees is a long way out of his wheelhouse. Still, they need firewood, and they needed to get out of that damn castle, and this pretext will do as well as any other. Together, they cross the old paved road and take a narrow track into the woods.

“Did your family own all of this?” Sypha asks, her eyes roving every which way. The melancholy that had come upon her earlier seems to have completely evaporated, replaced by her usual quicksilver curiosity.

“Yes,” Trevor replies, batting away a strand of ivy. “All the way down to the river on the east, and fifty furlongs west. I’m surprised the church let it go to ruin: there’s good land here.”

“The church has been estranged from rationality for many years,” Alucard says dryly. “Still, aren’t we lucky? They’ve given us all these lovely trees to use.”

Trevor ignores that.

“Doesn’t wood burn better if it’s dried first?” Sypha adds, with a hint of amusement. Trevor goes to ignore that too, but her words tickle something in his brain, some memory half-discarded and nibbled at by mind moths. Drying wood…

“Wood shed!”

“Excuse me?”

Trevor turns to face the both of them. “There was a wood shed! A shed-”

“For wood?” Alucard examines his fingernails.

“Fuck you, Alucard.” Trevor rolls his eyes. “It was away from all the other outbuildings, it might not have been burned!”

“So, we will not have to chop down a tree?” Sypha clarifies.

“If I’m right. It’s this way, I think.”

“Oh good,” Alucard mutters as he falls into step behind them, “ _If_ you’re right. I do so love gambling with terrible odds.”

“Not whining about a little walk, are you, Alucard?” Trevor ribs. In return, he gets a hiss.

“Oh, stop it,” Sypha snaps, “before I use one of your heads to knock down the tree we want! Lord knows they are hard enough!”

They tromp for a far longer distance than can be categorised as “a little walk”, relying on Trevor’s shaky memories of childhood evenings spent hauling logs for the fire. There had been a bunker at the back of the main house; but that had been refilled every few months from…

“Hah!” A low stone building, half-swallowed by brambles and moss, looms up from the undergrowth. Suggestions of an old path snake off in the direction of the manor: Trevor remembers it as being on the edge of a small copse, but now clearly the trees have merged and spread their roots ever deeper. Trevor shoulders open the rotting door to reveal row upon row of neatly stacked, bone-dry logs. He surveys them with smug satisfaction, then tosses one to Alucard. “Catch.”

“You are a pustule, Belmont.”

“He’s back to his old self,” Sypha stage-whispers, then clasps her hands in an intricate movement. “Out of my way, Trevor!”

“Sypha, we can carry these,” Alucard says, but the speaker-magician glares at him with such ferocity that he snaps his mouth closed.

“Let her have her fun,” Trevor advises, beating a hasty retreat to the door. “Afterall, hedgehogs have a special affinity for wood-piles.” A stick zooms off the floor and pokes him hard in the forehead. “Ow!”

“Oops.” Sypha grins at him, all teeth, before spreading her arms and causing half the wood shed to rise into the air. “Let’s go, then!”

They make a strange procession back through the forest: three human shaped figures and one floating mass of firewood. Occasionally they startle deer, or send birds twittering for the sky, but they don’t see another living soul. Trevor finds himself lost in thought. He had been a little boy here: just a child, swinging a wooden sword. This land had been his own diminutive kingdom. There had been dogs and horses and autumn hunts, the cry of the horn echoing out over the valley. He had been desperate to go out and chase monsters, careering through the orchards with wild yells and visions of inevitable glory, attacking the crab-apples and harassing butterflies.

His stomach turned. The orchard was no longer a safe haven. For many years now, it was where all his nightmares started. Up in the old pear tree, and seeing a ribbon of smoke twist up into the November air…

That wasn’t how it had really happened, of course. He had been a young man when the house burned, too old for games in the orchard and chafing against the world that seemed set to restrain him. When the church had sent down the edict of excommunication, Trevor had walked out, unable to face his parents’ inexplicable terror. He had been hot-headed and frustrated- and somehow, that had saved him. When they chained the doors, he was away on the east side of their land, tracking a deer. When they threw the first torch, he was roosting in a tree. When his family burned, he was asleep, safe and sound, unaware that the life he’d known and people he loved had been reduced to ash.

He hadn’t been there, but he’s seen it plenty of times in his dreams. A bitter taste floods his mouth. After all the roads he’s taken, all the fights and choices and desperate acts, he’s ended up back here. Every beginning is rooted in an end; every joy milled from sorrow.

“You’re thinking.”

Alucard’s voice jolts him from his miserable reverie.

“What?”

“It merely seemed like a remarkable occurrence. Perhaps I should ask Sypha to weave it into the Speaker histories.”

“Ask me what?” Sypha calls back to them, stilling Trevor’s impulse to smack the back of Alucard’s head as hard as he can. He contents himself with grunting and rolling his shoulders.

“How much of a dickhead you have to be to get into the Speaker verbal histories,” he tells her, grinning with satisfaction when Alucard looks like somebody’s curdled the milk.

“Uh-huh,” she says, disbelieving. As they step back onto the old road, the sun is setting, gilding the ruins of the Belmont home and illuminating Dracula’s castle. “Well, we’re back!”

“Praise be,” Alucard mutters, although his shoulders are back to being tense and drawn as he stares at the yawning mouth of the great front doors.

“I was thinking,” Sypha says, tracking up the steps with the great ball of firewood following her like a strangely leashed pet, “we should make the kitchen a little nicer. It seems safe from intrusion so far, and I for one will not be sleeping on the floor again!”

Trevor pauses. After all the events of the day, he had almost forgotten the way it had started: the three of them slumbering quietly, tucked under the covers of his ginormous bed. The peace of that moment contrasts so sharply with all the pain that had come after it; it’s like a feast compared to fasting, or water to the husk. Such a hunger rises in him that he barely stifles it in time.

 _You’re lonely_ , he wonders. Then he crushes the thought before it can take root and bloom. Whatever happened last night- he can’t have it again. It wouldn’t be a fair request for either of them. Better to stay back.

 _Sleeping in the kitchen is different, though_ , a small sneaking voice worms its way through his defences, _if it’s what everyone wants_. _Safer, too. And warm_.

“That seems… reasonable,” Alucard agrees, after a moment. If Trevor didn’t know better, he would have said Alucard was having an internal battle of his own. Nevertheless, if there was a consensus…

“Alright,” he shrugs. “What do you want me to do?”

He’s dispatched up the sloping staircase to fetch cushions from one of the undamaged rooms. One of Alucard’s strings is looped around the torch brackets and he keeps an idle hand on it as he climbs ever higher. This part of the castle is largely foreign to him; he watches carefully where he puts his feet. He remembers Alucard’s obstacle course, back under Gresit, and he has no desire to end the day dangling from some uncomfortable precipice. All he wants is a roaring fire and somewhere comfortable to lay his head. And also maybe some food.

He’s so distracted by the thought of roast pork that he almost misses the quiet hiss of depressing stone. But he doesn’t miss the sudden lurch of the floor as the whole corridor begins to turn on its axis, sending him sliding back down the passageway with alarming rapidity. He makes an undignified noise- sort of a “whoa!”- before grabbing the Morningstar and flicking it out to hook around a torch bracket. The metal creaks, but holds, which is lucky because the staircase is now completely vertical and Trevor is hanging over a precipitous drop.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he mumbles, unable to work up the energy to be scared, “I specifically said _no_ _dangling_?”

There’s no answer. Trevor groans in a self-pitying manner. Then he glares down at the black void yawning far below him. “I still think your trapdoors are shit!”

Again, no answer. Trevor cranes his neck instead, but the top of the passageway is clouded with the same impenetrable shadows as the bottom. Well. Now what?

“Is this what you did to my ancestors?” He grumbles. “Just dangled them until they gave up?”

He supposes Sypha and Alucard will realise he’s missing after a while. He’s got no idea how they’ll get in to rescue him, but if anybody can do it, they can. He’s just got to- well. Hang in there.

Trevor huffs out a sigh, then adjusts his grip on the Morningstar’s handle. Not comfortable, but not terrible. He could drop down and try to balance on a torch bracket, he supposes, but it probably won’t be any easier than just clinging on. _Let the waiting commence_.

Thankfully, Sypha and Alucard do indeed come running to his rescue not long after. Turns out the whole set-up was some strange kind of magical illusion, designed, as Alucard so succinctly put it, to result in madness, not mangling. After some stern chanting from Sypha, Trevor is returned to the right way up and swiftly checked over for injuries. “Are you OK?” He’s asked, and he shrugs it off. They’ve all had worse, after all.

They spend the night beside the ruddy warmth of the kitchen hearth, the pallor of exhaustion beaten back in the face of the glowing flames and easy companionship. They sleep. No nightly noises come to them. Trevor does not dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted this without a preview because train wifi
> 
> there will be typos
> 
> ack


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Older wounds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oop I'm back.
> 
> Did camp nano. Did dissertation. Have mildly infectious disease (mumps? why is that such a funny word) and wrote this chapter in a day. *chef kiss*

The inner quarters of the Archbishop’s sanctum have a close, stifling quality. Words are swallowed; voices hushed. Within the meeting chamber, the light filters through narrow windows high above in the tower walls, set with a red glass that lends the circular room a bloody quality. The red robes of those present glow like jewels, casting a ruddy sheen over the wearers’ cheeks. They sit, immobile, on stone chairs, set at intervals around the perimeter. As a scene, it is strange. Almost hellish.

“Has it stopped?”

The first man to speak up is thin and stretched out, with a heavy face and protuberant nose. His chain signifies his position: the Cardinal of Garneds. His voice signifies his stance: fear, wariness, a trembling through every syllable.

“So it seems.” The answer is cool, detached by comparison. This is from the Archbishop of Coustaces.

“But how? The hordes…”

“The hordes are dwindling as we speak.” Coustaces replies. If the men inside this room have names, they never acknowledge them. They are consumed by their positions, by their faith.

“Their life force was linked to that abomination,” growls the northernmost Cardinal, the one who witnessed the destruction at Brăila from afar. “But it’s gone now. Our Lord tore it from the earth, blessed be His name.”

“If he did, he didn’t do a very good job.” A fourth voice joins the conversation. This is one of the original successors, one who was anointed alongside the Bishop of Targoviste, one who has seen Rome and all its wonders. He is now cadaverously old, with spotted skin and a puff of white hair clinging to a sagging scalp. In anticipation of his news, he leans forward in his seat, lips parted, hands as claws on the arms of his chair. “It’s been _seen_.”

“What?” Garned’s voice quakes even more in his shock. “The castle?”

“Yes, the castle. It is not gone, it is not smote from the face of the earth, it is fully intact and apparently perfectly normal.”

“May God protect us,” Garned whispers.

“Where did you get this?!” The northerly Cardinal blusters. “I saw the castle vanish myself! Into thin air!”

“As Dracula’s castle has been recorded doing for several centuries.” Cardinal Sophistro sounds almost bored. “My source of this information has seen the castle with his own eyes. He rode hard for three days to bring the news to me.”

“And where does this _source_ claim the castle is?” Coustaces asks. The disdain is not far from his voice.

“On our lands,” Sophistro replies. “On the site of the old Belmont estate.”

There is a silence at this pronouncement. Sunset looms down upon them, intensifying the colour of the light, making it seem almost liquid.

“ _Belmont_ ,” a neighbour of Coustaces muses, “Belmont… I have not heard that name in a long time.”

“Excommunicated!” When puffed up, the Bishop who saw the fall of Brăila bears a strong resemblance to a turkey. He jabs a finger in his righteous wrath. “For practicing dark magic. Every child in Wallachia knows that tale!”

“And so they were,” Sophistro acknowledges, “yet their…” he pauses delicately, “ _history_ with Dracula cannot be denied.”

“There are no Belmonts left! They were burned as the heretics they were. I remember it well.”

“But what if one had survived?” Sophistro’s voice is the only part of him that has escaped the ravages of age, and he uses it now, low and silky, winding through the blood-drenched air. “What if a Belmont had been spared? Would you not think his experiences might have jaded him? Might we consider the possibility that the last surviving heir of the Belmonts has joined forces with Dracula?”

“There are no surviving Belmonts!”

“And yet there were strange tales from Gresit. Common folk who spoke of a tall man with black hair and the sigil of heretics sewn onto his clothes.”

“An imposter,” Yet another Cardinal offers. “Anybody can wear clothes.”

“True. And yet this “imposter” fought Dracula’s horde in the town square. He fought them and won.”

The silence that greets this news is nothing short of stunned. Sophistro clasps his hands together.

“And now you begin to see. We thought the fight was coming to an end… When in reality it is only just beginning.”

Garned fumbles with a rosary and begins to pray. The rest look to Sophistro.

“What shall we do?”

Sophistro smiles. He looks even more like a dead man. He relishes their anticipation, these moments of shifting tension and power. “I believe I have a solution.”

~

“We will need livestock. Horses, a goat or two, chickens. They can be penned here.” Sypha gestures to an open patch of ground just beyond the shadows cast by the looming turrets of Dracula’s castle. “And a vegetable garden, just here.” She looks up at him, shading her eyes from the bright sunlight. “We will be able to survive quite nicely.”

Trevor looks at the blank stretch of trampled grass and decides to take her word for it. Picturing growing things has never been his strong suit. “Alright.”

A silence hangs between them. An expectant sort of silence.

“So…” Sypha prompts, eventually. Trevor looks at her.

“So, what?”

“So, will you go to the market in the valley and purchase these things?”

“With what gold?” Trevor sounds more irritable than he really is. This is because he’s stalling. He will do so for as long as Sypha lets him get away with it.

“You know as well as I do that Alucard found a cache of coins three days ago,” Sypha chides him. “And it has to be you to go. I will provoke questions-” Trevor sees her again with fresh eyes, wiry Sypha in her tattered speaker robes, hair growing out to brush her neck, and acknowledges that yes, she will indeed provoke questions, “- and Alucard would be even worse.”

Trevor is not yet defeated, however. “Oh, and I won’t attract any attention, I’m sure. A man walking from the direction of the Belmont Estate, with Belmont features and a Belmont accent. That won’t arouse suspicion at all.”

Sypha narrows her eyes, which is a bad sign, so Trevor rushes on.

“And how am I supposed to bring all that back? In a sack?”

“Trevor…”

“What,” he grumbles.

“You don’t want to go to the village!” She exclaims, eyes wide with realisation. “You’ve been putting it off.”

A grappling combination of hatred and loathing leap up in his chest, like fighting dogs. He works to keep it from his face, instead glaring into the distance and sighing. “Got there, have you.”

Sypha makes a noise of distinct impatience. “I do not know what is wrong with you sometimes, Trevor.”

“Join the club,” Trevor mutters, and he strides away before he says something he really regrets.

The village of Arnem squats in his mind like a predatory shadow, threatening from afar, rising up and growing larger whenever the threat of having to return there creeps up on him. It feels like ashes in his mouth; like never-ending whispers that slink through the underbrush of a wood at night. On occasion, he’s been close enough to the edge of the valley to see the church spire emerging from the scrubby woods down below, the same church spire as all those years before, a sharp little beacon to all those who hated and hate the things he’s held most dear. The same one. Would the people still be the same? The butcher, the baker, the heretic-maker? Would Larrat the blacksmith remember the black-haired kid who watched him quench horse shoes and try to pull the scythes from the walls? Would the deacon be old and grizzled now, his wife ever more sour, their thatched roof more rot than straw? Would the priest…?

_The priest_. The one who threw the first fucking torch.

Bile rises up in his throat. He’d thought he’d moved beyond this. He’d thought he’d grown up. But being so close again is tearing up the rotten floorboards he’d laid down over that endless pit of grief and rage, and he teeters on the edge, teeth gritted, hands scrabbling for purchase. If he goes down to Arnem, he will have to face all of that.

Or he’ll raze the entire place to the ground. One of the two.

He ends up on the edge of the pit, staring down at his pathetic repairs to the shattered remains below. Belmonts stare from the walls, painted with faces of stern courage, hands on weapons and ready for anything. They wouldn’t have cowered in the orchard, watching the smoke reaching up to the sky.

An hour later finds him trekking down the steeply sloping woodland trails, a purse full of coins at his waist, a sword in his belt. Alucard hadn’t said much to him when he’d gone up to the castle and asked for both those things, and Trevor hoped that meant there would be no questions. He was doing this alone, or he wasn’t doing it at all. Dressed in the plainest clothes Dracula’s castle could offer he could be any old huntsman, any roving mercenary, any ordinary man skulking into town.

An ordinary man with the Belmont features and the Belmont accent, a snide voice somewhere inside his head reminds him. An ordinary man who will stand out to any who remember.

But it has been fifteen years, he reminds himself. Maybe none are left who lived when his family did.

He can’t decide whether this thought brings him anger or happiness. Wrestling with this dilemma brings him all the way to the edge of the wood, all the way to the narrow dirt track that wanders its way into the village of Arnem.

The little town is a traditional form of crofters’ gathering, single-storey stone dwellings scattered in a seemingly random fashion around a weed-cracked square and the modest church. Their fields and crops stretch out south-east towards the anaemic little river. As Trevor walks nearer, he realises that it is indeed almost identical to fifteen years ago. The forge will be just on his right. The pointed spire rears up over the tiny town, casting a shadow whenever the sun decides to peek out from behind the clouds.

Few people are out in the streets. With a strange jolt Trevor realises that, of course, it’s not market day. Market day only happened every second Saturday, and the day today was… Well, he had no idea. Keeping track of the date had been low priority when dying had felt so urgent. He prowls into town, past the silent forge, past the inn with its closed-up door and blank windows, right underneath the looming line of the spire. His shoulders are hunched. His ears prickle at the distant sound of clucking chickens, of the creak of a mill wheel somewhere down by the river. When somebody hails him, he almost cringes.

“You there! Stranger!”

A young man has come up behind him, short, red-haired and with the strapping arms of a smith. Larrat’s son. He must be. He’s the spit of his father. The recognition sends a shock through Trevor; he freezes.

“Hey!” Larrat’s son repeats. A slow grin breaks out across his face, making his eyes shrink even further. “I’m talking to you, halfwit!”

Trevor finds that the insult lacks its old bite, having been called an idiot by both of his living companions half-a-hundred times, but all the same he stiffens.

“What.”

Something in his voice makes the boy halt. He is still half a boy, perhaps as old as Trevor had been the day his home burned. His beard is coming in. Still, he finds some courage from somewhere. “Who are you?”

“Smith,” Trevor answers, dryly. “I came for the market, but I see I must have missed it.” Even to himself, he sounds calm. Normal. His heart is pounding. When had that started?

“ _Smith_.” Larrat-junior weighs the name in his mouth with an appropriate level of disdain. Through his haze of adrenaline, Trevor finds time to feel mildly impressed.

“Who’s this, Narrat?” A woman appears from between two houses, no doubt drawn by the sound of the conversation. A crofter’s wife, probably. Trevor doesn’t recognise her. She looks him up and down with suspicious eyes.

“Smith, he says,” Narrat answers.

“Humboldt Smith,” Trevor offers. “I come from-”

But he is saved from making a feeble excuse by the arrival of a third voice, one he knows, one that heralds the start of every waking dream that ends in fire and death.

“You there, son,” the priest says. “What brings you to Arnem?”

He is still a slender, elegant man, his long cassock trailing over the ground, his hands bony where they are clasped in front of him. He was not old when Trevor was growing up and now has the look of a man not so far past his prime that he can’t look back on it and brush it with his fingertips. His dusty hair is frozen partway through turning to grey. But it is his face that Trevor remembers most: the pointed chin, the thin lips, the way it would move and twist as he read from the pulpit every Sunday morning. _Son, he calls me. As though he knows_.

“I came…” He tries to repeat about the market, but his throat is dry; dry as tinder, as bone. _Like a coward. A coward who hid instead of saving the people he loved_.

_You had to_ , he repeats the old lie, but it has no power here, not in the little rotten heart where all the poison stemmed from, _you had to else you would have died too, like a pig to slaughter_. He stares into the eyes of the priest and they are pale brown and empty of fire but Trevor can see it, he can smell it, choke on the acrid scent of the smoke. His throat works.

“My son?” The priest asks. His face is kind, placid.

Some kind of storm is blowing up inside Trevor. His thoughts chase each other round and round, the ones that he had once quietened with drink and then with purpose, but oh, how they howled now. His sisters. The orchard. Smoke on the horizon…

His hand closes around the hilt of his sword.

From the riverside fields, there comes the howl of a wolf. Long and piercing, it floats through the sunshine air with an unreal quality, turning heads all around the square.

“A wolf!” Larrat cries, suddenly fumbling, distracted.

“My goats!” The woman looks around frantically. “They was over by the woods!”

People come running now, some towards the church, others towards the wolf. The priest begins calling for order. “Those who cannot fight, you may shelter in the church! Come, my children-”

And then, in the confusion, something tackles Trevor hard in the side and knocks him to the ground, between two houses.

“Get up,” a familiar voice hisses, before familiar hands grip vice-like around his shoulders and hoist him to his feet. “Into the woods. Now!”

Trevor feels cast loose, unable to do anything but follow. He crouches low and runs from between the squat houses in the direction of the trees. Nobody sees his flight. They are all too busy running after the wolf; the wolf who waits beneath the trunk of an aspen, once again in his more human shape.

“Belmont,” he says, and Alucard has never quite said his name this way, with such bite. “What. The fuck. Were you doing.”

Trevor actually feels his heart close up, feels it shrivel into a hot, hard coal in his chest. He laughs, a sharp bark. “Buying livestock, Alucard! But I missed the fucking market. What a shame.” He realises that his teeth are bared, but makes no effort to calm his expression. In the distance, they can hear the villagers calling amongst one another, fanning out, searching for the predator in their midst.

_They just missed him. But he’s still here, waiting in the woods. Come and get me._

Alucard stares at him in that inscrutable way, then makes an irritable jerk with his head. His long hair doesn’t fall in his face for once- he’s bound it up, out of the way. “We’d best move, before the villagers chance upon the true white wolf.”

Trevor doesn’t move.

“Are you deaf, Belmont? Move.”

The words emerge softly from his mouth. “Let them come.”

“I’m sorry?” For once in his life, Alucard genuinely seems confused.

“Let them come. Let them come and face the justice they so richly deserve!” He draws the sword in an easy motion. His teeth are still bared. “Let them come and answer-” he slashes the air once, “for their crimes!” He slashes again, his heart still thundering, the dogs in his blood baying a sweet song. _Finally_. Finally, he will make them pay.

“You were there for an entirety of seven minutes, what could they have possibly-”

“They burned my family alive!” Trevor roars. He no longer cares about being heard. He no longer cares about much at all, apart from that fucking priest. “You think they sent outsiders here to do it? No! They stirred up Arnem, and Dasset, and Hargrote, and all the other shitty little hamlets so they never had to light a damn torch themselves.”

He’s breathing hard. Perhaps they’re already on their way, Narrat and Larrat and Father Sesquil. _Let. Them. Come_.

There are shouts, not far off. Trevor whirls the sword again.

Then a hand lands on his shoulder; implacable, a little cool. But the voice that speaks is not cool. It betrays perhaps more emotion than Trevor has ever heard in those aristocratic tones. “I did not know. But still, I must ask you to move.”

“Told you, you bastard,” Trevor says. “I’m staying right here.”

In that irritating, quicker-than-thought manner he has, Alucard appears in front of him and knocks the blade aside. “Allow me to rephrase: I will not permit that.”

Trevor laughs at him, right up until Alucard’s other hand grips his other shoulder and the vampire leans in closer, intimidatingly, his eyes tinged with ruby red. He finds that he can stare nowhere else but into those eyes, and his adrenaline spikes ever higher. _Threat, threat, threat_ , his brain screams. He dimly remembers there’s a sword in his hand. But why would he use it?

“Do you hear me, Belmont?” Alucard breathes. “We have dragged your sorry arse too far for you to waste it over some pawns of the church. Do you hear me? Too. Far.”

The intensity in his voice pierces Trevor’s defences, scales the flaming walls. He sucks in a breath through the nose, his mind still running in circles but the urge to fight suddenly removed, turned aside. He is shaking, he realises. Can he hide it from the vampire? Alucard will never let him live it down…

But no ribbing follows. Alucard doesn’t even say a word. He simply grips Trevor’s shoulders, hard, then he lets go.

“Come on,” he mutters, and finally, Trevor does as he says. They leave the village behind. They turn for home.

 ~

“No chickens?” Sypha meets them on the steps, her face creased in disappointment. Trevor wants to snap, but he can’t find the words, so he stands there silently, like a cowed dog.

“Leave it, Sypha,” Alucard says sharply. Wait, _Alucard?_

Sypha frowns, then her eyes widen. “What happened? Trevor? Are you alright?” She runs to him, hands in anxious readiness, and he doesn’t know what to do with this, how can they be treating him gently when he is so weak?

“It was the villagers,” Alucard supplies. His voice is subdued. “They were the ones who burned the Belmont home.”

Sypha gasps. Then she’s upon Trevor before he can even resist it, her arms reaching up to catch around his shoulders, her whole body pressed against his like she can transmit more comfort if she supplies more contact. Trevor just stands there, stunned. What- how long- how can she- his sisters-

To his intense shame, a hot lump settles in his throat, sending burning tears to swim in his eyes.

“If you had only told me!” Sypha snaps, but her voice comes out muffled where it’s pressed into the cloak hanging off his shoulder. “You stubborn, stupid arsehole.” There is emotion in her voice, too, trembling there like energy before a thunderstorm. The lump in his throat grows hotter, heavier.

“I agree with her,” Alucard puts in, from where he stands, one foot on the steps, staring at them both embracing. Trevor doesn’t understand the expression on his face. He doesn’t understand much, any more. “You are a stubborn, stupid arsehole.”

“Thanks,” Trevor chokes out, but neither of them laugh at the obvious sob hidden in the word. Something strange seems to be happening to his body, caught between the arms of Sypha. It’s as though he’s thawing; or melting; she is truly fire and she’s pouring heat back into him. Could he have been frozen? Could he have been caught in the cold and not noticed it?

_You’ve been out in the cold for years. It keeps you strong, remember?_

Trevor pushes away, letting Sypha’s arms fall, standing alone again. “Let’s go inside, shall we?” He mutters, and leads the way back into the entrance hall.

 ~

Brăila smells like smoke and salt and crumbling destruction. The ship now creaking into port is one of the few things moving in the bleak grey morning, the hitch and snap of the sails unnaturally loud in the eerie silence. She’s a sizeable thing, tall mast sliding alongside the dock, drawing glances and whispers from the citizens still left alive until a sizeable crowd has gathered to watch her tie up and lower the gangplank. This ship, the Shining Sword, is the first to return after the calamity of Dracula’s castle; the first one brave enough to venture back. The gaunt-eyed crowd shuffles and stares. The cog is unfamiliar, patched and battered from savage storms, clearly traipsing back after a long and perilous journey.

The man who descends the gangplank is lean and battered too, pale skin burned brown by some foreign sun, scraggly beard clinging to a square jaw, a freshly healed cut tracing a line above his left eyebrow. His clothes mark him as a warrior. The sigil on his chest marks him as something rather more; but the people of Brăila have not seen such a man in many long years, so few of them take any notice of it. At his hip is a longsword, protruding from under his cloak. His face betrays no emotion as he surveys what remains of the once mighty port town.

There is a commotion at the back of the crowd. Somebody is trying to force their way through, arms working, his eyes fixed on the recently landed.

“Sir Hugh! Sir Hugh!”

The warrior- the knight- steps down onto the cobbles and motions for the crowd to clear a path for the messenger. He puffs to a halt before the slowly disembarking crew of the Shining Sword.

“You are Sir Hugh of Palantvir?” He asks. The rugged man nods. “Then I bring word from the Cardinal Sophistro. Calamity has come to Wallachia. You are summoned immediately to Targoviste. You will have new orders. Bring your men and muster the rest. Your war is not yet over.”

Sir Hugh of Palantvir merely nods again. Then he turns back to the ship.

“We march for Targoviste!” He calls, and his voice is a clarion call, a battle horn, a sword flashing bright in the grey, dead surroundings of the remains of Brăila.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHOO CHOO the Trevor angst train just keeps rolling
> 
> Also you shouldn't do research when you're ill, it's probably wrong  
> (too many dog metaphors. woof woof bitch)  
> also I hate inventing names just leave me in my sickbed

**Author's Note:**

> Some dialogue taken from the last episode of season 2.


End file.
